"Katharine Kerr - Resurrection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kerr Katherine)

same as this store does now; the memory-store is merely a corner store, not a flush-to-the-sidewalk
store. The discrepancy makes her shake her head hard, She turns and looks back at the broad street,
crammed with pedestrians hurrying along between the bus lanes, and at the sidewalks, packed with the
bins and barrows of the various peddlers тАФ a woman selling shao mai here, a man with sausage rolls
there, a table of cheap clothes, wooden crates of spatulas and ladles. Overhead1 the sky is darkening to
the velvet blue that means sunset and night, when white lights will stab and shatter the world. She should
take her transfer to the stop on Sixth and get the streetcar for home. On the other hand, the bookstore
seems to invite her in with its yellow light and a quilt of colors beyond the windows: the shelves inside, all
stacked with book cartridges and paper-books, red and blue and yellow. She walks through the door.

In this particular store the science fiction section lies all the way to the back. As she makes her way
through the narrow aisles, past heaped and jumbled sensations of bright covers, holograph scenes of far
places, the shiny three-dee portraits of authors, the occasional poster talking at her in a tinny voice, and
as other customers cross her path or block her way, women burdened with shopping bags and one
precious novel to take them to some better place in their minds, children clutching shiny comics to their
chests, old men holding news cartridges that need refilling, she begins to breathe a little fast, to feel sweat
form and bead on her back and upper lip, but she forces herself to walk slowly, to breathe slowly, to
concentrate on keeping her bad hand in its pocket and the good hand from knocking stacks of cartridges
to the floor, until she reaches a relatively open space in front of the correct shelves, where she can let the
tension ease and round up the pieces of her mind again.

The nearby posters start talking as soon as they sense a warm organic presence in front of them.
Although she automatically ignores the babble of tinkling blurbs, Tiffany stares at the pictures for a long
time. Starships against dark Galactic skies, aliens holding beautiful artifacts, landscapes never seen,
washed by strangely colored seas, stretching out to jagged mountains, dotted with trees that never grew
тАФ they all glow with fascinations that swarming Earth and the barren dullness of Mars and Moon will
never match. If she cannot find HUNTER'S NIGHT, she decides, she will buy a new book and see how
well she can follow it. Since she's always loved reading, every few weeks she buys a new book, takes it
home, spends an hour or so making slow sense out of letters that used to form words automatically,
trying to make the words once deciphered form into mental pictures and meanings and sounds, the way
they always used to before, easily and magically. So far she's always given up after two or three pages or
two or three screens. Dr. Rosas suggests that she buy kids' books, but the doings of clothed animals and
small children have not yet been able to hold the interest of a woman back from four years of war. If she
could only find HUNTER'S NIGHT. She's sure that it would be different, reading again the one book
that she can remember reading, and this time she would find out how the damn thing ended.

Since she cannot just remember and match the name she carries in her head with the names she finds on
the cartridge labels or the spines of paper-books, she fishes in the cargo pocket of her pants for the slip
of paper she always carries. Some weeks ago she printed out Allonsby's name and the book title in big
blocky letters with black ink, a template of sorts. She finds the slots allotted to the "A's" on the shelves
and goes through them slowly, hesitantly, dreading the disappointment which does indeed come. A-D
A-L-L A-L-L-E A-N. She holds the paper up, squints back and forth between her own printing and the
long line of names on label and spine. No A-L-L-O's at all. Not one. No Allonsby, no nobody.

"Damn!"

"Help you, Miz?"

Tiffany yelps, spins, sees a young man, slender, black, hands up over his face as he steps back fast.
With a gulp for air she catches herself, stands still, gulps again, feels sweat run down the small of her