"Ian R. MacLeod - Nevermore" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

Arthritic, Cro-Magnon, he wandered out from his bed. Knobbled legs,
knobbled veins, knobbled toes. He still missed the habit of fiddling with the
controls of his win-dow in the pockmarked far wall, changing the
perspec-tives and the light in the dim hope that he might stumble across
something better. The sun and the moon were blaz-ing down over Paris
from their respective quadrants, pour-ing like mercury through the
nanosmog. He pressed his hand to the glass, feeling the watery wheeze of
the crack that now snaked across it. Five stories up in these scrawny empty
tenements, and a long, long way down. He laid his forehead against its
coolness as the sour thought that he might try to paint this scene speeded
through him. He’d finished at least twenty paintings of foreal Paris; all reality
engines and cabled ruins in grey, black, and white. Prob-ably done, oh, at
least several hundred studies in inkwash, pencil, charcoal. No one would
ever buy them, and for once they were right. The things were passionless,
ugly— he pitied the potentially lovely canvases he’d ruined to make them.
He pulled back from the window and looked down at himself. His erection
had faded from sight be-neath his belly.

Gustav shuffled through food wrappers and scrunched-up bits of
cartridge paper. Leaning drifts of canvas frames turned their backs from
him toward the walls, whispering on breaths of turpentine of things that
might once have been. But that was okay, because he didn’t have any paint
right now. Maybe later, he’d get the daft feeling that, to-day, something
might work out, and he’d sell himself for a few credits in some stupid trick
or other—what had it been last time; painting roses red dressed as a
playing card?—and the supply ducts would bear him a few pre-cious tubes
of oils. And a few hours after that he’d be— but what was that noise?

A thin white droning like a plastic insect. In fact, it had been there all
along—had probably woken him at this ridiculous hour—but had seemed so
much a part of every-thing else that he hadn’t noticed. Gustav looked
around, tilting his head until his better ear located the source. He slid a
sticky avalanche of canvas board and cotton paper off an old chair, and
burrowed in the cushions until his hand closed on a telephone. He’d only
kept the thing because it was so cheap that the phone company hadn’t
bothered to disconnect the line when he’d stopped paying.

That was, if the telephone company still existed. The tele-phone was
chipped from the time he’d thrown it across the room after his last
conversation with his agent. But he touched the activate pad anyway, not
expecting anything more than a blip in the system, white machine noise.

“Gustav, you’re still there, are you?”

He stared at the mouthpiece. It was his dead ex-wife Elanore’s voice.

“What do you want?”

“Don’t be like that, Gus. Well, I won’t be anyway. Time’s passed, you