"Bruce Sterling - Islands In The Net" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

which shut behind her.
Laura could not understand why David actively liked her
mother. He'd insisted on her right to see her grandchild,
though Laura hadn't met her mother face to face in years.
David was taking naive pleasure in his mother-in-law's stay,
as if a week-long visit could smooth over years of unspoken resentment.
To David, family ties seemed natural and solid, the way
things should be. His own parents doted on the baby. But
Laura's parents had split when she was nine, and she'd been
raised by her grandmother. Laura knew that family was a
luxury, a hothouse plant.
Laura stepped into the tub and the curtain shunted shut.
The sun-warmed water washed the tension from her; she put
family troubles out of mind. She stepped out and blew her
hair dry. It fell into place-she wore a simple cut, short, with
light feathery bangs. Then she confronted herself in the mirror.
After three months, most of her postnatal flab had suc-
cumbed to her running campaign. The endless days of her
pregnancy were a fading memory, though her swollen body
image still lurched up sometimes in her dreams. She'd been
happy, mostly-huge and achy, but cruising on motherhood's
hormones. She'd given David some rough times. "Mood
swings," he'd said, smiling with fatuous male tolerance.
In the last weeks they'd both been spooked and twitchy,
like barnyard animals before an earthquake. Trying to cope,
they talked in platitudes. Pregnancy was one of those arche-
typal situations that seemed to breed cliche's.
But it was the right decision. It had been the right time.
Now they had the home they'd built and the child they'd
wanted. Special things, rare things, treasures.
It had brought her mother back into her life, but that would
pass. Basically, things were sound, they were happy. Nothing
wildly ecstatic, Laura thought, but a solid happiness, the kind
she believed they had earned.
Laura picked at the part in her hair, watching the mirror.
That light threading of gray-there hadn't been so much
before the baby. She was thirty-two now, married eight years.
She touched the faint creases at the corners of her eyes,
thinking of her mother's face. They had the same eyes-set
wide, blue with a glimmer of yellow-green. "Coyote eyes,"
her grandmother had called them. Laura had her dead father's
long, straight nose and wide mouth, with an upper lip that fell
a little short. Her front teeth were too big and square.
Genetics, Laura thought. You pass them on to the next
generation. Then they relax and start to crumble on you. They
do it anyway. You just have to pay a little extra for using the
copyright.
She lined her eyes, touched on lipstick and video rouge.
She put on hose, knee-length skirt, long-sleeve blouse in
patterned Chinese silk, and a dark blue business vest. She