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

'How would I know?' she said indifferently. 'Perhaps I was sick of looking at them. Perhaps I thought
it was high time. Michael, what are we doing here?'
Kearney laughed. 'I've got no idea,' he said.
He had run three thousand miles, and now the fear was abating he had no idea why he had come here
rather than anywhere else.
Later the same afternoon they moved into the apartment of a friend of his in Morningside Heights. The
first thing Kearney did there was telephone Brian Tate in London. When there was no answer from the
research suite, he tried Tate's house. It was the answer service there, too. Kearney put the phone down
and rubbed his face nervously.
Over the next few days, he bought new clothes at Daffy's, books at Barnes & Noble, and a laptop
from a cheap outlet near Union Square. Anna shopped too. They visited Mary Boone's gallery, and the
medieval Cuxa Cloister at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's branch in Fort Tryon Park. Anna was
disappointed. 'I expected it to look older, somehow,' she said. 'More used.' When they ran out of other
things to do they sat drinking New Amsterdam beer at the West End Gate. In the brown heat of the
apartment at night, Anna sighed and walked about fractiously, dressing and undressing.
 ELEVEN

Machine Dreams




Billy Anker's location, as disclosed to Seria Mau by Uncle Zip, was several days down the Beach from
Motel Splendido. Little would be required in the way of navigation until they encountered the complex
gravitational shoals and corrosive particle winds of Radio Bay. Seria Mau checked her supercargo into
the human quarters then found herself with nothing left to do. The White Cat's mathematics took over the
ship and sent her to sleep. She was powerless to resist. Dreams and nightmares leaked up from inside
her like warm tar.
Seria Mau's commonest dream was of a childhood. She supposed it to be her own. Oddly lit but
nevertheless clear, the images in this dream came and went, framed like archaic photographs on a piano.
There were people and events. There was a beautiful day. A pet animal. A boat. Laughter. It all came to
nothing. There was a face close to hers, lips moving urgently, determined to tell her something she didn't
want to hear. Something was trying to make itself known to her, the way a narrative tries to make itself
known. The final image was this: a garden, darkened with laurel and close-set silver birch; and a family,
centred on an attractive black-haired woman with round, frank brown eyes. Her smile was delighted and
ironic at once тАФ the smile of a lively student, rather surprised to find herself a mother. In front of her
stood two children seven and ten years old, a girl and a boy, resembling her closely about the eyes; the
boy had very black hair and was holding a kitten. And there, behind the three of them, with his hand on
her shoulder and his face slightly out of focus, stood a man. Was he the father? How would Seria Mau
know? It seemed very important. She stared as deeply into the photograph as she would stare into a
face; while it faded slowly into a drifting grey smoke which made her eyes water.
A further dream followed, like a comment on the first:
Seria Mau was looking at a blank interior wall covered with ruched oyster silk. After some time, the
upper body of a man bent itself slowly into the frame of the picture. He was tall and thin; dressed in a
black tailcoat and starched white shirt. In one white-gloved hand he held a top hat by its brim; in the
other a short ebony cane. His jet-black hair was brilliantined close to his head. He had eyes a penetrating
light blue, and a black pencil moustache. It occurred to her that he was bowing. After a long while, when
he had bent as much of his body into her field of vision as he could without actually stepping into it, he
smiled at her. At this, the ruched silk background was replaced by a group of three arched windows
opening on to the magisterial glare of the Kefahuchi Tract. The picture, she saw, was taken in a room