"M. John Harrison - Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

'But it's ridiculous,' he said.
She turned her dark eyes on him and never blinked.
Mathematics and prophecy: Kearney had known instantly that the two gestures were linked, but he
couldn't say how. Then, waiting for a train to King's Cross the following morning, he identified a
relationship between the flutter of cards falling in a quiet room and the flutter of changing destinations on
the mechanical indicator boards at the railway station. This similarity rested, he was willing to admit, on a
metaphor (for while a cast of the Tarot was тАФ or seemed тАФ random, the sequence of destinations was
тАФ or seemed тАФ determined): but on the basis of it he decided to set out immediately on a series of
journeys suggested by the fall of the cards. A few simple rules would determine the direction of each
journey, but тАФ in honour of the metaphor, perhaps тАФ they would always be made by train.
He tried to explain this to Inge.
'Events we describe as random often aren't,' he said, watching her hands shuffle and deal, shuffle and
deal. 'They're only unpredictable.' He was anxious she should understand the distinc-tion.
'It's just a bit of fun,' she said.
She had taken him to bed eventually, only to become puzzled when he wouldn't enter her. That, as she
had said, was the end of it as far as she was concerned. For Kearney it had turned out to be the
beginning of everything else. He had bought his own Tarot тАФ a Crowley deck, its imagery pumped up
with all of that mad old visionary's available testosterone тАФ and every journey he undertook after that,
everything he did, everything he learned, had drawn him closer to the Shrander.

'What are you thinking?' Anna asked him after they landed in New York.
'I was thinking that sunlight will transform anything.'
Actually he had been thinking how fear transformed things. A glass of mineral water, the hairs on the
back of a hand, faces on a downtown street. Fear had caused all these things to become so real to him
that, temporarily, there was no way of describing them. Even the imperfections of the water glass, its
smears and tiny scratches, had become in some way significant of themselves rather than of usage.
'Oh yes,' said Anna. 'I bet you were.'
They were sitting in a restaurant on the edge of Fulton Market. Six hours in the air had made her as
difficult as a child. 'You should always tell the truth,' she said, giving him one of the haggard, brilliant
smiles which had captivated him so when they were both twenty. They had had to wait four hours for a
flight. She had dozed for much of the journey, then woken tired and fractious. Kearney wondered what
he would do with her in New York. He wondered why he had agreed to let her come.
'What were you really thinking?'
'I was wondering how to get rid of you,' Kearney said.
She laughed and touched his arm.
'That's not enough of a joke, really, is it?'
'Of course it is,' Kearney said. 'Look!'
A steam-pipe had broken in some ancient central heating system beneath the road. Smoke rose from
the pavement on the corner of Fulton Street. The tarmac was melting. It was a common sight, but Anna,
delighted, clutched Kearney's arm. 'We're inside a Tom Waits song,' she exclaimed. The more brilliant
her smile, the closer she always seemed to disaster. Kearney shook his head. After a moment, he took
out the leather bag that contained the Shrander's dice. He undid the drawstring and let the dice fall into
his hand. Anna stopped smiling and gave him a bleak look. She straightened her long legs and leaned
back away from him in her chair.
'If you throw those things here,' she said, 'I'll leave you to it. I'll leave you on your own.'
This should have seemed less like a threat than it did.
Kearney considered her, then the steaming street. 'I can't feel it near me,' he admitted. 'For once.
Perhaps I won't need them.' He put the dice slowly back in the bag. 'In Grove Park,' he said, 'in your flat,
in the room where I kept my things, there were chalk marks on the wall above the green chest of
drawers. Tell me why you washed them off.'