"Elizabeth Moon - Aura2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moon Elizabeth)

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ELIZABETH MOON

AURA

Once a year everyone else hated numbers as much as she did. She faced the pile
of bank statements, receipts, 1099s, and W-2s with the comforting certainty that
everyone else -- all hundred million or so heads of household (or their spouses)
-- felt exactly the same about the columns of numbers. Taxes again. Some people
used computers, of course, and some had accountants. She had herself, four sharp
pencils, and a pen to ink over the numbers if they ever balanced.

Brad would check them before she inked them. In an ordinary year, he would
expect nothing of her but a steady supply of coffee and snacks, and the assembly
of the documents, but this year he had orders --doctor's orders -not to bother
himself with tax preparation. He was sure she could do the taxes if she tried.
He had recovered pretty well from the stroke, but he found it very hard to read.
The words, he said, jumped around on the page.

She knew all about that, but with her it was numbers. Letters had graceful
shapes, decorative qualities. Words carried with them their meaning smooth and
rough, clear and opaque, each word on the page evoking a separate image in her
mind. They never tangled themselves up, and best of all no one ever insisted on
checking the sum, Numbers . . . she remembered her second-grade teacher slapping
a ruler on the desk, and insisting that numbers were simpler than words, that
any child who could read so well could surely add. "There's only one right
answer," her teacher had said, and she had understood even then why words were
better. You could imagine green as any shade of green you wanted . . . it didn't
have to be right.

She remembered the trickle of sweat down her sides under her starched dress
during flashcard drills, the horrible foreknowledge that she would blurt out the
wrong answer and have to sit down, while another child "traveled" to the next
desk. The children had laughed; the teacher had scolded her for carelessness;
her mother had dragged her to the eye doctor for tests. Her eyes, he'd said,
were normal. It was probably an emotional thing, a physical symptom of her
dislike of numbers. Most girls, he'd said as he parted her head, didn't like
arithmetic. Her mother and the teacher both interpreted this as laziness and
deceitfulness, and she'd spent miserable hours with the flash-cards until she
passed into third grade.

Now she watched the numbers writhe, the blurred print of Brad's W-2 shimmering
so that she could hardly pick out the middle two digits of his Social Security
number. Why did they insist on using numbers for identification? She'd have
gladly changed her name to something outlandish to ensure uniqueness. And if
they had to use them, why couldn't she put her own number? But they demanded
his, and there was something even more humiliating about being identified by his
number instead of her own. She didn't like it; she never had, and she never