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

would.

She printed Brad's number in the little space, grimly careful, and began filling
in the other blanks. Perhaps if she concentrated -- her teachers had emphasized
the dangers of daydreaming, of letting her imagination loose where numbers were
concerned-- she could get through this. She would treat it as a recipe, a long,
complicated old-world recipe, or perhaps directions for reupholstering a couch.
First you do this,then that, and at the end it looks like something you could
eat, or sit on.

The problem was that she had no picture in her mind of what the completed,
perfect tax form should look like. Cookbooks had pictures of those fancy dishes.
Sewing books or home decorating books had pictures, pictures of drapes, dresses,
furniture. The directions would make sense, because she would know what the end


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was . . . if you add sleeves to bodice, and bodice to skirt, you have a dress.
If you add filling to meat, and meat to pastry, you have a fancy entree. Numbers
had no pictures; she could not see anything in them, no final outcome of all
these blanks filled in except a form with its blanks filled in . . . it meant
nothing.

She found she'd miscopied the amount of interest income, and erased it
carefully. That was wrong of course. Carelessness. It did mean something; it
meant if she made a mistake, they would come for her. They would take the money,
and the house, and even put her in prison. The page before her shimmered, then
went flat; for a moment she could not find the right blank to fill in. Prison
was all numbers, like the military. Brad had been in the military; he still
said, "By the numbers," sometimes, a kind of joke from those days. She had
written him two letters, to addresses full of numbers and letters in a jumbled
mix that made no sense. Why, she had asked, couldn't the army have normal
addresses? He had laughed.

Doggedly, she poked the calculator's flat-topped buttons. Wrong; she forgot the
decimal point. Another wrong; her finger had slipped from the 8 to the 5. She
blinked at the bank's form. Was that a computerized 0, or an 8? Hard to read
anytime, and now . . . her chest tightened. She took a deep breath, held it, let
it out slowly. Eight, or zero? Zero. Eight. The diagonal wavered, became
horizontal, wavered back to diagonal, a tiny compass needle leading her the
wrong way. She felt pressure in her head; the numbers acquired a sinister aspect
on the page, even beyond the threat of taxes, IRS, flash cards. She would have
to quit for today; she would have to come back to this later, another time,
after a night's rest.

She carried the wineglass carefully by the stem, so that she .would not smudge
the clean delicate curves with her fingers. It seemed a long way from the
kitchen to the dining room. It was the first time she had been trusted to carry