"Lee Killough - Deathglass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Killough Lee)

Twenty-four hours later I stepped off the plane in Gateside and caught the cabletrain for Aventine.
Artists built the mountain retreat. The rich and famous have discovered its isolated peace and filled the
shores of the Lunamere and Heliomere with their villas, but the center still belongs to the artists. Shops
and studios with balconied living quarters above them lined Terpsichore Road and the other muse-named
streets I walked on the way to Garrett's studio. Sonic sculpture sang at me in passing. A kinetropic piece
recognized movement near it and rattled a greeting with wooden rings. Garrett's studio had no sign, no
streetside sample, only a window etched into a delicate floral fantasy surrounding large letters, тАЬBENETтАЭ,
and under them, smaller and simply, тАЬGlassтАЭ. I pushed open the front door.
The smells inside were those of my life... acid and hot glass and the warm-metal scent of an annealing
oven. Past three straight wooden chairs and a single glass showcase holding a half dozen or so finished
pieces, the studio spread beneath fluorescent lamps: tables scattered with pieces of cut glass and
works-in-progress; bins of glass rods and irregular chunks; an asbestos-and-stone-topped workbench
with holders, spreaders, gas jets, blowpipes; another workbench under a strong light, backed by a rack
of enamel and acid bottles. A gangly form sat at that workbench with his back to the door.
"I'll be with you in a minute," Garrett said.
I trotted across the studio to his shoulder. "Is that any way to greet your kid brother?"
For the first time in my life, he did not grin and hurl himself at me. Instead, Garrett's fingers whitened
on his paintbrush. "Did Claudia send you?"
"I saw the Newsweek article on your exhibit and thought as long as I was on vacation, I'd drop in." It
was half the truth at least. "An interesting change in style."
"Is that what you think."
His voice shut me out, remote as the peaks above Aventine. Remembering my father's black moods,
my gut knotted. "Garrett-- " I began hoarsely.
Overhead, the ceiling creaked. Garrett looked up for a moment, then turned toward me. "It's begun,
Dane."
The knots tightened. "Have you been to a doctor?"
He frowned irritably. "I don't need a doctor. We all know the signs... depression, inexplicable and
uncontrollable anger, incoordination, twitches. There've been times when my hands shook so much I
couldn't work, and I'm thirty-six, the same age when Father-- "
I cut him off. "An anxiety reaction. You're giving yourself the signs just by worrying-- "
"Dane, stop it!" His arm raised, and for a moment I thought he might smash his work, an
antique-looking, footed bowl of streaky amber glass, what the Victorians called a coupe, to the floor. But
he stopped, and after a moment, resumed work on it... painting the silhouette of an antique car, I saw
now. "You think that by refusing to admit something exists, it can't. That's no answer, any more than
Claudia's vitamins and brewer's yeast."
The ceiling creaked again. This time I recognized the cause, someone walking. The soft footsteps
crossed overhead toward the staircase at the end of the room. A pair of bare feet appeared on the
stairs.
"But there is an answer," Garrett said. "Dane, may I present Aletheia."
The woman came down the stairs, all long, smooth limbs, brief neo-grecian playsuit, and ebony hair
pulled up into a casual topknot, but the thought that crossed my mind was Pygmalion, not priestess. For
under the studio lights her hair had a shifting purple sheen, as though it were not black at all but deep
iridescent violet, and her skin glowed with the pearly inner light of glass reaching the melting point. In a
moment of caught breath, reaching out for a slender hand that felt hot, too, I wondered if Garrett's genius
could have created her of opalescent glass, giving her the classic face of a Greek statue and setting her
eyes with amethysts, then used the knowledge from his arcane religions to breath life into her.
"In a manner of speaking, perhaps he did." Her amethyst eyes smiled into mine, then while I was still
realizing that I had not spoken my thought aloud, shifted past me to an askance focus on Otherness that