"Nancy Kress - Feigenbaum Number" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

FEIGENBAUM NUMBER (v1.1)
NANCY KRESS




In the mirror I saw her eyes narrow, her mouth tighten. The other woman turned from the
window, laughing, one slim graceful arm pushing back a tendril of chestnut hair.
Diane skinned her brown hair back from her face. "Is it too much to ask, Jack, honey, that
just once after we make love you don't go rushing off like there's a three-alarm fire? Just
once?'
I didn't answer.
"I mean, how do you think that makes me feel? Slambam-thank-you, ma'am. We have an
actual relationship here, we've been going out for three months, it doesn't seem a lot to ask
that after we make love you don't just -- "
I didn't interrupt. I couldn't. The dizziness was strong this time; soon the nausea would
follow. Sex did that. The intensity. Diane ranted, jerking herself to a kneeling position on the
bed, framed by lumpy maroon window curtains opened a crack to a neighbor's peeling frame
house and weedy garden. Across the room the other Diane stood framed by crimson silk
draperies opened a crack to a mellowed-wood cottage riotous with climbing roses. She blew
me a light-hearted kiss. Her eyes glowed with understanding.
The nausea came.
" -- can't seem to understand how it makes me feel to be treated like "
I clutched the edge of the dresser, which was both a scratched pressed-board
"reproduction" and a polished cherrywood lowboy. Two perfume bottles floated in front of me:
yellow plastic spraybottle and clean-lined blown glass. I squeezed my eyes shut. The ghostly
Diane disappeared in the act of sauntering, slim and assured, toward the bathroom.
" -- don't even really look at me, not when we make love or -- "
Eyes shut, I groped for the bedroom door.
"Jack!"
I slammed the doors, both of them, and left the apartment before Diane could follow. With
her sloppy anger, her overweight nakedness, her completely justified weeping.
Outside was better. I drove my Escort to campus. The other car, the perfectly engineered
driving machine with the sleek and balanced lines, shimmered in and out around me, but the
vertigo didn't return. I'd never gotten very intense about cars, and over the years I'd learned
to handle the double state of anything that wasn't too intense. The rest I avoided. Mostly.
The Aaron Fielding Faculty Office Building jutted boxlike three stories from the asphalt
parking lot, and it blended its three floors harmoniously with a low hillside whose wooded lines
were repeated in horizontal stretches of brick and wood. The poster-cluttered lobby was full
of hurried students trying to see harried advisers, and it was a marble atrium where scholars
talked eagerly about the mind of man. I walked down the corridor toward my cubicle, one of a
row allotted to teaching assistants and post-docs.
But Dr. Frances Schraeder's door was open, and I couldn't resist.
She sat at her terminal, working, and when I knocked on the doorjamb (scarred metal,
ghostly graceful molding), she looked up and smiled. "Jack! Come look at this!"
I came in, with so much relief my eyes prickled. The material Fran's long, age-spotted
fingers were held poised over her keyboard, and the ideal Fran's long, age-spotted fingers
echoed them. The ideal Fran's white hair was fuller, but no whiter, and both were cut in simple
short caps. The material Fran wore glasses, but both Frans' bright blue eyes, a little sunken,
shone with the same alert tranquility.