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

toppling through space. Slowly, the man in the tailcoat bowed himself back out of it.
If this dream's purpose was to elucidate the one which had preceded it, nothing was achieved. Seria
Mau woke up in her tank and experienced a moment of profound emptiness.
'I'm back,' she told the ship's mathematics angrily. 'Why do you send me there? What is the point of
that?'
No answer.
The mathematics had woken her, relinquished control of the ship, and slipped quietly back up into its
own space, where it began to sort the quanta leaking from significant navigational events in non-local
space, using a technique called stochastic resonance. Without quite knowing why, Seria Mau was left
feeling angry and inadequate. The mathematics could send her to sleep when it wanted to. It could wake
her up when it wanted to. It was the centre of the ship in some way she could never be. She had no idea
what it was, what it had been before K-tech webbed them together forever. The mathematics was
wrapped! around her тАФ kind, patient, amiable, inhuman, as old as the halo. It would always look after
her. But its motives were completely unknowable.
'Sometimes I hate you,' she advised it.
Honesty made her amend this. 'Sometimes I hate myself,' she was forced to admit.
Seria Mau had been seven years old the first time she saw a K-ship. Impressed despite herself by its
purposeful lines, she cried excitedly, 'I don't want to have one of those. I want to be one.' She was a
quiet child, already locked in confrontation with the forces inside her. 'Look. Look.' Something took her
and shock her like a rag; something тАФ some feeling which would eventually marshal all of her other
feelings тАФ rippled through her. That was what she wanted then.
Now she had changed her mind, she was afraid it was too late. Uncle Zip's package taunted her with
its promise, then delivered nothing. A sense of caution had led her to isolate it from the rest of the ship.

The visible part of it lay on the deckplates in a small room in the human quarters, in a shallow red
cardboard box tied with shiny green ribbon. Uncle Zip had presented it to her in his typical fashion, with
a signed card depicting putti, laurel wreaths and burning candles; also two dozen long-stemmed rose. The
roses now lay scattered across the deck, their loose black petals stirring faintly as though in a draught of
cold air.
The box, however, was the least of it. Everything inside was very old. However Uncle Zip dressed it
up, neither he nor anyone else could be sure of its original purpose. Some of these artefacts had identities
of their own, with expectations a million years out of date. They were mad, or broken, or had been built
to do unimaginable things. They had been abandoned, they had outlived their original users. Any attempt
to understand them was in the nature of a guess. Software bridges might be installed by men like Uncle
Zip, but who could be sure what lay on the other side of them? There was code in the box, and that
would be dangerous enough in itself: but there was a nanotech substrate of some kind too, on which the
code was supposed to run. It was supposed to build something. But when you dialled it up, a polite bell
rang in empty air. Something like white foam seemed to pour out and spill over the roses, and a gentle,
rather remote female voice asked for Dr Haends.
'I don't know who that is,' Seria Mau told the package angrily. I don't know who that is.'
'Dr Haends, please,' repeated the package, as if it hadn't heard her.
'I don't know what you want,' said Seria Mau.
'Dr Haends to surgery, please.'
Foam continued to cover the floor, until she closed the software again. If she could smell it, she
thought, it would smell strongly of almonds and vanilla. For a moment she had a recollection of these
smells so clear it made her dizzy. Her entire sensorium seemed to break its twenty-year connection with
the White Cat, toppling away into night and helpless vertigo. Seria Mau flailed about inside her tank. She
was blind. She was wrong-footed. She was terrified she would lose herself, and die, and not be anything
at all. The shadow operators gathered anxiously, clinging up in the corners like cobwebs, hushing and
whispering, clasping their hands. 'That which is done,' one reminded another, 'and that which remains