"Matthew Hughes - The Meaning of Luff" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Matt)

A young lordling did not welcome being told, "The meaning of your life is that you will father a child who
will in turn father a child who will, seventy-three years from now, bump into a man on a street corner,
causing that man to miss an appointment."

They preferred to hear, "Because of a remark that you drop into a casual conversation, a brilliant new
epoch in appliqued fabric design will sweep the finest salons of Olkney. Unfortunately, it will not become
the overpowering vogue until months after your demise, but your genius will be recognized as its inciting
spark, and the ages will remember you and bless your name."

He was not surprised that the clients found these patent fantasies much more palatable than the blunt
truth. But it continued to wear on Imbry that so many of the lives he touched to the salience indicator
were revealed to be of almost no consequence at all. So many people were little more than placeholders,
keeping a seat warm until someone of true moment should come along and briefly occupy it.
"But, perhaps," he told himself, "I achieve these tiresome, tawdry results because I am limiting the
revelations to the idle rich, who live notoriously unproductive lives. If I sought out saints and savants, I
would likely see cheerier visions."

Then he reminded himself that the quality of the visions was not the purpose of the endeavor. The goal
was to make wealth flow thickly toward Luff Imbry, and the returns were more than handsome. Imbry
used them to indulge his increasingly elevated tastes and fancies--especially those that arose from his
gustatory appetites. He devoured dishes that were legendary, including some that could not be created
more than once in a century, so rare were the ingredients. From these occasions he derived a grim
satisfaction, reveling in the textures and aromas, while saying to himself, If not I, then who?

Sometimes, as he lay in his bed, the savors of the evening's feast lingering on his palate, his mind would
drift toward the inevitable question. Always, he pushed temptation away. What would it serve to know
the salience of Luff Imbry? If he learned the context of his existence, for good or ill (and he did not
expect much good), could he summon the strength to go on doing as he did?

He recalled one client whose purpose in life was discharged even before he reached full maturity: by
waving a wad of currency under the percepts of an autocab, the young buck had snatched it from a poor
young woman already late for an interview with an editor, thus smothering a prospective great literary
career in its infancy. The rest of the client's life was an empty afterthought. The young woman's fate was
unrecorded.

Suppose Imbry discovered that the point of his being had been unwittingly achieved in his youth. Could
he go on filling and voiding his innards, year upon year, knowing that his moment had already come and
gone, unmarked, unheeded?

Or suppose, for all his mastery of the arts of peculation and hornswogglery, he turned out to be but a
minor player in someone else's grander game--the user used--would his pride withstand the illumination?
These were questions best left unanswered.

It would be different if he had someone with whom he could share the burden of such knowledge, but
Imbry accepted that solitariness was a necessary condition of the profession he had freely chosen. It
would not do to make dear friends only to see them become liabilities that must be disposed of.

Then one evening, he came to the denAarrafol house to discover that Welliver Tung had arrived before
him. She was waiting in the now opulent room where the salience indicator sat, wearing an expression