"Ian McDonald - Some Strange Desire" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

symbol and ritual.
He is awake. The brightness in his eyes is only the reflection of the television
screen. Awake now, he seems a thing of horror himself. Shrunken, shriveled,
transparent skin drawn taut over bird bones, fingers quivering spastically as
they grip the edge of the duvet. Trapped in that final tletchen, too weak to
complete the transformation. His breasts are slack and withered like the dugs of
old bitches.
"I've made tea, but it's probably cold now." I pour a cup, milk and sugar it,
hold it steady as he lifts it to his lips. The tea is cold, but he seems glad of
it.
"You were out." His voice is a grotesque whisper.
"Business." He understands. Our clients, both ul-goi and goi, are never
business.
"That pimp?"
"He won't trouble you again. I can promise that."
"This isn't forty years ago. They've got computers, genetic fingerprinting."
"The people in the car park, if any of them even noticed, will tell them it was
a woman got out of the car. The taxi driver will swear he drove a man."
"Still... "
I take his hand in mine, modulate my pheromone patterns to convey calm,
assurance, necessity. It was more than just a pimp harassing us to join his
stable, more than him breaking into this apartment, terrorizing my sick sister,
overturning the furniture, desecrating the shrines of the hahndahvi. It was
security, tesh security, which is more powerful and paranoid than any goi
conception of the word, for it has its roots in ten thousand years of secrecy.
I offer him a Penguin biscuit. He shakes his head. Too weak. Too tired. I pull
the stand from its position behind the headboard close by the side of the
mattress. From the fridge in the kitchen I take the next-to-last bag of blood.
As I run a line in, he says, "There was a call for you. I couldn't get to it.
Sorry. It's on the answering machine."
I am back in the kitchen, filling a basin with water. I test the temperature
with my elbow.
"Vinyl Lionel?"
I fetch the natural sponge I bought from the almost-all-night chemist around the
corner, whip the water to froth with Johnson's baby-bath.
"A new one," my sister Cassiopia says.
I pull back the duvet. The smell of the sickroom, the terrible smell of
prolonged, engrained sickness, is overpowering. As the blood, my blood that I
pumped out of myself into plastic bags yesterday, runs into him, drip by drip, I
wash my sister's body. Gently. Lovingly. With the soft natural sponge and the
gentle baby-bath; neck and arms and sagging, flat breasts, the small triangle of
pubic hair and the tiny, wrinkled penis and testicles, smaller even than a
child's, and the shriveled labia.




15-16 November
Only four days. It seems like a small forever, since the afternoon Cassiopia
came back from the pitch at Somerville Road with twenty pounds in his pocket.