"Vonda N. McIntyre-Spectra" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

Spectra
by Vonda N. McIntyre
This story copyright 1979 by Vonda N. McIntyre. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use.
All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


I am dreaming. I reach out for something I have lost, something beautiful. I cannot remember what it is,
but I know that it is there. Sounds echo in the background. My hands are stopped. I push against the
barrier, straining, helpless. I open my eyes to darkness, and remember. I am lying in my sleeping place,
with my hands pressed hard against the ceiling just above me, as if I could push it away and be free
again. My hands move across the smooth cold surface to corners, as far apart as the width of my
shoulders, down the walls to the narrow spaces at my sides. My hands stop, and I lie still.
There is a quick sharp pain in my leg as the cannulae withdraw from the valve implanted in my ankle.
The bell that woke me rings again, the bell that calls us to our work. The panel opens at my feet, and light
pierces the dark hole in which I am imprisoned. I turn over and crawl out, backward, bending my elbows
so I don't scrape my back on the ceiling. I stand on the walkway among the formless gray shapes of the
others. Our routine is unchanging, unchangeable. The walkway slides, taking us toward our consoles.
Everyone around me whispers and laughs, but I am silent.
They all claim they know what beauty is. They say they see it every work period. They say the
patterns that direct us calm and gratify and excite them. They are proud they are better than machines.
They say it is ecstasy. If all I could remember was the blackness and the shadows and the broken bars of
light, perhaps I could be as content, but I can never feel what they do.
The walkway stops. I turn, walk two steps, and slide into the seat of my console. The fear that touches
me every day reaches deeper. I have tried to avoid the helmet before, and learned better. It engulfs my
head, cutting off the shadows of my sight. The probes reach out and touch the metal sockets that replace
my eyes. I flinch back, but I cannot move away. The probes enter, and the patterns begin.
I work hard. I do my duty. I watch the patterns of darkness and light and do what they tell me. But I
want to see the day again.
The sky and the trees are what I remember most. The trees brushed their points against blue, all
around our house. The bark was rough and the needles soft and sharp. When I climbed the trees my
hands became sticky with golden pitch that left the smell of evergreen on my fingers. The sky was the
color of my mother's eyes (I wonder if they took hers away, too?). I only saw the end of the sky once,
when I walked too far and the forest stopped. I was very young. I stood at the edge of a cliff
accompanied by wind and sun. And I saw that the sky ended in a yellow-brown roiling cloud. I ran home
crying, real tears salty on my tongue, drying stiff on my face. My mother comforted me. She said the
cloud would never come any nearer. I did not walk that way anymore, even when I was older and should
not have been afraid.
A mild electric shock jerks me to awareness. Some error has been made. Three of us work on each
set of patterns, as a check against mistakes. I look again, consciously, at the image in my brain. I do what
it indicates. My error is confirmed and corrected. I cannot escape my punishment by drawing away or by
bracing myself. It jolts through me, and my fingers clench. It is not too strong this time, but if I err again it
will be worse. I think that's because they know that sometimes I make mistakes on purpose. The others
say they never make mistakes. I don't believe it. I hate their silly patterns. It took them a long time to
teach me how to figure out what each set of lines told me to do. They are all different, and I didn't want
to learn.
 When I was little I could make figures in the dark by pressing my fingers against the corners of my