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

Things went exactly as she had predicted. Before the Nastic vessel could read, Seria Mau had
engaged the mathematics; the mathematics had engaged whatever stood in for reality; and the White Cat
had vanished from that sector of space, leaving only a deteriorating eddy of charged particles. 'You see?'
said Seria Mau. After that it was the usual boring journey. The White Cat's massive array тАФ aerials an
astronomical unit long, fractally folded to dimension-and-a-half so they could be laminated into a
twenty-rnetre patch on the hull тАФ detected nothing but a whisper of photinos. A few shadow operators,
tutting and fussing, collected by the portholes and stared out into the dynaflow as if they had lost
something there. Perhaps they had. 'At the moment,' the mathe-matics announced, 'I'm solving
Schr├╢dinger's equation for every point on a grid of ten spatial and four temporal dimensions. No one else
can do that.'
 THREE

New Venusport, 2400 AD




Tig Vesicle ran a tank farm on Pierpoint Street.
He was a typical New Man, tall, white-faced, with that characteristic shock of orange hair that makes
them looK constantly surprised by life. The tank farm was too far up Pierpoint to do much trade. It was
in the high 700s, where the banking district gave out into garments, tailoring, cheap chopshop operations
franchis-ing out-of-date cultivars and sentient tattoos.
This meant Vesicle had to have other things going.
He collected rents for the Cray sisters. He acted as an occasional middleman in what were sometimes
called 'off-world imports', goods and services interdicted by Earth Military Contracts. He moved a little
speciality H, cut with adrenal products from the local wildlife. None of this took much of his time. He
spent most of his day on the farm, masturbating every twenty minutes or so to the hologram porn shows;
New Men were great masturbators. He kept an eye on his tanks. The rest of the time he slept.
Like most New Men, Tig Vesicle didn't sleep well. It was as if something was missing for him,
something an Earth-type planet could never provide, which his body needed less while it was awake.
(Even in the warmth and darkness of the warren, which he thought of as 'home', he twitched and mewled
in his sleep, his long, emaciated legs kicking out. His wife was the same.) His dreams were bad. In the
worst of them, he was trying to collect for the Cray sisters, but he had become confused by Pierpoint
itself, which in the dream was a street aware of him, a street full of betrayal and malign intelligence.
It was mid morning, and already two fat cops were pulling a convulsed rickshaw girl from between the
shafts of her vehicle. She was flailing about like a foundered horse, cyanosing round the lips as everything
went away from her and got too small to see. Street Life was playing on her personal soundtrack, and
caf├й ├йlectrique had blown up another determined heart. Entering Pierpoint about halfway along its
length, Vesicle found there were no numbers on the buildings, nothing he could recognise. Should he wall;
right to get to the high numbers, or left? He felt a fool. This feeling segued smoothly into panic, and he
began changing direction repeatedly in the teeth of the traffic. In consequence he never moved more than
a block or two from the side street by which he had entered. After a while he began to catch glimpses of
the Cray sisters themselves, holding court outside a falafel parlour as they waited for their rents. He was
certain they had seen him. He turned his face away. The job had to be finished by lunch, and he hadn't
even started. Finally lie went into a restaurant and asked the first person he saw where he was, to
discover that this wasn't Pierpoint at all. It was a completely different street. It would take hours to get
where he was supposed to be. It was his own fault. He had started out too late in the day.
Vesicle woke from this dream weeping. He couldn't help but identify with the dying rickshaw girl:
worse, somewhere between waking and sleeping, 'rents' had become 'tears', and this, he felt, summed up
the life of his whole race. He got up, wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his coat, and went out into the