"Jody Lynn Nye - Muchness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nye Jody Lynn)

decayed fish and sour coffee grounds. She wrinkled her nose.
"WhтАФwhat do you want?" she gasped. It growled again, looming toward her, sniffing and snorting. It
didn't seem eager to kill her, so perhaps it was intelligent.
"What do you want?" she demanded, louder, throwing her head back so all of gray creation could hear
her. "I insist that this reality make it possible for you to understand me!" The atmosphere around her
changed, ever so slightly. The beast grunted out some slimy polysyllables. The gray air altered again,
and Valerie felt herself change. She grew a little taller, and she had to spit out excess saliva that flooded
her mouth.
"You're not going to make me like you!" she sputtered.
She pictured herself as she had last seen her reflection in the lab: human, smooth-skinned, and far less
juicy. The beast could dry up; she wouldn't.
They vied for dominance in a strange battle of wills, until the beast's eyes narrowed. It hissed, "Enough!"
Valerie didn't know if it spoke English or she suddenly understood Monster, but they were
communicating at last.
"What do you want?"
"Completion," it growled. "Conclusion. Symmetry. You are unbalance. Fix!"
"How can I give you conclusions?" Valerie asked. "Do you want scientific theories? Logic problems?"
The beast regarded her greedily. "Energy. Must start and finishтАФlike your life."
"If you let me finish my mission, you'll have a conclusion. A complete arc of energy."

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 Muchness by Jody Lynn Nye

"Not see beginning or realize end. Want experience of symmetry, here, now. You conclude, I drink.
Otherwise, I conclude you." It moved closer, sniffing its wedge-shaped nose up one of her arms and
down the other. No escape. She was going to die. Valerie surreptitiously wiped the damp mucus off her
skin with a fold of her skirts. The beast raised its head suddenly and roared in her face. Valerie jumped
backward, then braced herself as a thought occurred to her.
"What if I tell you a story?"
"Eh?"
"A story. An experience; um, does it matter if it's real or not?"
"If begin at the beginning, and end at the end, then stop, no difference."
"So a fictional account is all right? It will do?"
It nodded greedily.
Valerie clawed at her memory for a fairy tale, or any kind of a story she could remember from beginning
to end. Her nerves were interfering with her concentration. Not surprisingly, her mind was blank. At her
hesitation, the beast moved closer to her, with saliva gleaming on its fangs and dripping down out of the
corners of its complicated jaws. She blurted out the first thing that came into her mind, an echo from the
distant years of childhood.
"Once upon a time, there were three bears." While she recounted the adventures of the ungrateful
Goldilocks ransacking the home of three nonoffensive ursines, Valerie had the growing urge to burst out
into hysterical laughter. The last thing she'd have imagined on the way to work this morning was telling
bedtime stories to a scaly monster.
Goldilocks was routed, and the bears had their home again. Valerie shakily stated, "The End."
The monster nodded its huge head. It seemed pleased but not at all satisfied. Its moist, rubbery lips
spread back, revealing rows of sharpened molars that went almost all the way to the back of its skull.
Hastily, Valerie snatched another tale from memory, Andersen's "Little Match Girl."
That didn't really have a conclusion, at any rate not a satisfying one, to her or to the monster. The beast
became displeased, and threw back its head in a howl that made the flesh crawl on her body. The
muchness seemed to get farther away. Valerie knew instinctively the portal would recede until it was out