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

into the satellite New Towns, it swept Mother and his little empire with it.
Three years after the bombing stopped, the Blitz really began, he says. After
three hundred years of metropolis, he felt a change of environment would do him
good. He is quite the born-again suburbanite; he cannot imagine why we choose to
remain in the city. With his two sisters, our aunts, he runs a discreet and
lucrative brothel from a detached house on a large estate. The deviations of
suburbia differ from, but are no less deviations than, the deviations of the
city, and are equally exploitable.
As Mother opened the door to me an elderly man in a saggy black latex suit
wandered down from upstairs, saw me, apologized and vanished into the back
bedroom.
"It's all right dear, he's part of the family," Mother shouted up. "Really, you
know, I should stop charging him. He's been coming twenty years, boy and man.
Every Tuesday, same thing. Dresses up in the rubber suit and has your Aunt Ursa
sit on his face. Happily married; he's invited us to his silver wedding
anniversary party; it's a nice thought but I don't think it's really us, do
you?"
To the eye they were three fortysomething slightly-but-not-too-tarty women, the
kind you see pushing shopping trolleys around palazzo-style hypermarkets, or in
hatchbacks arriving at yoga classes in the local leisure center rather than the
kind that congregate at the farthest table in bars to drink vodka and laugh
boorishly.
My mother was born the same year that Charles II was restored to the monarchy.
We kissed on the mouth, exchanging chemical identifications, tongue to tongue. I
made no attempt to mask my feelings; anxiety has a flavor that cannot be
concealed.
"Love, what is it? Is it that pimp again? Is he giving bother?" He sniffed
deeply. "No. It's Cassiopia, isn't it? Something's happened to him. The Law?
Darling, we've High Court judges in our pockets. No, something else. Worse. Oh
no. Oh dear God no."
Chemical communication is surer and less ambiguous than verbal. Within minutes
my aunts, smelling the alarm on the air, had cut short their appointments with
their clients and congregated in the back room where no non-tesh was ever
permitted. In the deep wing-chair drawn close to the gas heater sat my
grandmother, seven hundred years old and almost totally submerged into the dark,
mind wandering interminably and with death the only hope of release from the
labyrinth of his vast rememberings. His fingers moved in his lap like the legs
of stricken spiders. We spoke in our own language, sharp-edged whispers beneath
the eyes of the hahndahvi in their five Cardinal Points up on the picture rail.
Jhash. It was made to be whispered, that word. I suggested medical assistance.
There were prominent doctors among the ul-goi. Sexual inclinations do not
discriminate. What with the advances goi medicine had made, and the finest
doctors in the country, surely something...
"It must be concern for your sister has temporarily clouded your judgment,"
whispered Aunt Lyra, "otherwise I cannot imagine you could be so stupid as to
consider delivering one of us into the hands of the goi."
My mother hushed him with a touch to his arm.
"He could have put it a bit more subtly, love, but he's right. It would be no
problem to recruit an ul-goi doctor, but doctors don't work in isolation. They
rely upon a massive edifice of researchers, technicians, laboratories,