"Terry Dowling - The Lagan Fishers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dowling Terry)

MF pandemic damaging much of the genetic viability first of Europe, then Africa and Asia, on and on, to close
some important doors for everyone, to unite the world, make them finally destroy the old weapons. The
destroyable ones.
Jeanie would have put her spin on it. Her spindrift.
Sam grinned at the night. More language from the sea. More shipwreck talk. Spindrift blew along the road,
the skeins and eddies of spores and hedge-dust, the "moonsilk," the "flit," the "dross"-there were so many
names-but, whatever it was, all safely moribund, sufficiently chemically inert, they said, though still finely,
subtly psychoactive just by being there. Had to be. Part of the night. This night. His.
Theirs. Jeanie keenly there. His lagan love. Still.
Sam breathed in the bounty, filled his lungs with all the changed nature. Howard was right. Blooms and
hedges. Lagan. Watchtowers, thunderheads, cathedrals and hutches. So much better than crystalline
molecular skeuomorphs with key attributes of long-chain polymer-calcinite hybrids or whatever they were
touting in the net journals.
Then the cathedral sighed, the only word for it. A single falling note swelled against the croisie, a distinct
sad trailing-away sound that left the alien lagan-tone, the honey-balm and the night-wind beyond like a
strange silence when it had gone.
From the cathedral?
Sam accepted that it was, knowing that almost all the logged lagan anomalies were around the big
cloudform and cathedral loftings. The hutches and nestings, the basements and even stranger
sub-basements were always silent, but the loftings sometimes belled and breathed and sounded like this,
like great whales of strangeness making their song.
The mikes would have tracked it. Nearby stats had to be homing in, risking burn. Tomorrow there'd be
extra flybys and spec groups.
Sam walked closer to the looming thirty-meter structure, looked up into the interstices of the triple spire,
the converging, just-now braiding salisbury points, then down to where the portal and narthex would be in a
true cathedral. He began a circuit. There was only the croisie now and the distant wind if you listened for it.
There were no doors in the logged salisburys, chartres and notre dames. There were outcroppings like
porches and lintels, but no doors, no chambers. The loftings were always solid lagan.
But here was a door-rather a shadowing, a doorness beneath such an outcropping, a cleft between
buttress swellings that held darkness like one.
Why now? Why mine? Sam thought, but came back, Jeanie-wise, with: Why not? If not now, when?
Still he resisted. He'd finally-mostly-accepted the lagan. He'd welcomed the wealth, but mainly the
companionship the lagan had brought, a new set of reasons for people doing things together. But he wanted
nothing more, no additional complications. Another old fin-de-siècle saying from Life Studies covered it: "not
on my watch."
Had to be-ready, the words came, bewildering him till he realized they answered his two unspoken
questions.
A sentient, talking, telepathic cathedral? It was too much. It was bathos.
But it made him move in under the overhang, the lip of the porch, whatever it was, made him step into the
darkness.
He found her there, found her by the darkness lightening around her; the final corner of the narthex, apse
or niche ghost-lighting this latest, incredible lagan gift.
She would never be beautiful, if she were even the right word. The eyes were too large, the face too
pinched, the ears and nose too small, like something half-made, a maquette, a Y99 Japanese animé figure, a
stylized, waxy, roswell mannequin. The naked body too doll-smooth, too androgynous, with not even
rudimentary genitalia or breasts that he could tell, yet somehow clearly not meant to be a child.
He knew who she was meant to be.
"You're not Jeanie." He had to say it.
No. It sounded in his mind.
"You're something like her. A bit."