"Rudy Rucker - Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch
RUDY PUCKER
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)

Rudy Rucker (www.rudyrucker.com) lives in Los Gatos, California. He has published fifteen
novels to date, several science non-fiction books, and some software. His collected stories, Gnarl!,
was published in 2000. Rucker is one of the original cyberpunks of the Movement, and later the
inventor of transrealism, a literary mode, not a movement. He won the Philip K. Dick Award for
best paperback original novel in the U.S. twice, for Software and for Wetware. He's now a retired
math and computer science professor and is writing up a storm. His 2006 novel is Mathematicians
in Love.

"Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch" was published in Interzone, which began to settle into a new
commercial look in 2005. Full of true strangeness, it relates how Harna, one of those weird SF
creatures who can travel through time and space using branes, helps Glenda Gomez fulfill her lust
by helping her abduct Hieronymus Bosch. Sound wild? It is wilder than that.

As an unemployed overweight unmarried overeducated woman with a big mouth, I don't have a lot of
credibility. But even if I was some perfect California Barbie it wouldn't be enough. People never want to
listen to women.

I, Glenda Gomez, bring glad tidings. She that hath ears, let her hear.

An alien being has visited our world. Harna is, was, her name. I saw her as a glowing paramecium, a
jellyfish, a glass police car, and a demonic art patron. This morning, when she was shaped like a car, I
rode inside her to the fifteenth century. And this evening I walked past the vanishing point and saved our
universe from Harna's collecting bag. I'm the queen of space and time. I'm trying to write up my story to
pitch as a reality TV show.

Let's start with paramecia. Unicellular organisms became a hobby of mine a few months ago when I stole
a microscope from my job. I was sorting egg and sperm cells for an infertility clinic called Smart Stork.
Even though I don't have any kind of biology background they trained me.

I'm not dumb. I have a Bachelor's in Art History from San Jose State, which is just a few blocks from my
apartment on Sixth Street. Well, almost a degree. I never finished the general education courses or my
senior seminar, which would probably, certainly, have been on Hieronymus Bosch. I used to have a
book of his pictures I looked at all the timeтАФ although today the book disappeared. At first I thought it
was hidden under something. My apartment is a sty.
My lab job didn't last longтАФI'm definitely not the science type. I wasn't fast enough, I acted bored, I
kissed the manager Dick Went after one too many lunchtime CoronasтАФand he fired me. That's when I
bagged my scopeтАФa binocular phase-contrast Leica. I carried it home in my ever ready XXL purse.
Later that day Dick came to my apartment to ask about it, but I screamed through the door at him like a
crazy person until he went away. Works on the landlord, too.
Now that I have a microscope, I keep infusions of protozoan cultures in little jars all over my apartment.
It's unbelievably easy to grow the infusions. You just put a wad of lawn grass in with some bottled water.
Bacteria breed themselves into the trillionsтАФrods and dots and corkscrews that I can see at 200X. And
before you know it, the paramecia are right there digging on the bacilli. They come out of nowhere. What
works really well is to add a scrap of meat to an infusion, it gets dark and pukeful, and the critters go
wild for a few days till they die of their own shit. In the more decadent infusions you'll find a particular
kind of very coarsely ciliated paramecium rolling and rushing around. My favorites. I call them the