"Elizabeth Moon - Aura2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moon Elizabeth)

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dislimned into portraits of dead faces, green on black. Then they turned gold,
brilliant glittering specks of gold that broke crisply into angled patterns,
dazzling. Migraine aura. She knew it had to be that, and nothing more . . . even
when the gold brightened intolerably, each speck spreading to a wide flake like
one lens of an insect's compound eye.

It stared at her, remote and hostile, each lens reflecting her child's face, the
two little bows she had worn holding the side-hair back, the lace collar. The
child's mouth opened -- her mouth -- and out sped geometric solids of glittering
gold, flashing light from each facet, from a numeral etched on each face.
Hundreds of mouths, hundreds of solids, hundreds of numbers, sickeningly in
motion as the vast insect turned its head. From around the eye jointed antennae
sprouted, proliferated, elaborated, into great feather fans that waved toward
her.

She turned the light on. She had never seen the room before, this tiled kitchen
floor with its glittering reflection, the ominous bulk of some purring alien at
her side. She grabbed for safety, and its side came away in her hand; cold air
poured over her feet. Re-fri-ger-a-tor floated through her mind in a stuttering
sequence, each sound edged with tattered frills of meaning. She leaned toward
the light and cold, but it disappeared with a faint thud, exhaling a stale odor
of roast and vegetables. All across her vision, the faceted mosaic of gold and
black lay between her and the strange room. Then it wavered and vanished,
leaving behind only an edge of brightness around each object, a vague shimmer.

She still did not know the room. Or, she told herself, she knew it
intellectually, but as an abstraction. She knew the canned peas would be behind
that door; she knew her dishes had a pattern of blue flowers on white. It did
not interest her, and it held no memories of emotion. Her dishes could have been
cream with pink roses, or yellow with a chain of blue squares. The table on
which she had served so many meals might have been oblong instead of round. It
might have had another cloth on it. The printed pattern of hers, a wreath of
green vine leaves, seemed to mock her.

Take your medicine, one comer of her mind told her. Take it now. Medicine. The
medicine was down the hall again, in the dark, in the bathroom cabinet. It was
locked, she would have to turn on the light to find the key. Brad would waken,
and be muzzily sympathetic. In less than a breath, the right side of her face
went stiff, she could feel the hardening of that side of her brain, as if
someone had poured concrete into her empty skull. Too late now . . . a spike of
pain impaled her head. Nausea rolled her stomach. So stupid, she told herself.
You should have taken the medicine when you woke Up. She told herself that every
time.

She could not have worked on taxes the next day even if the threat of another
migraine had not pressed in on her, squeezing her mind to the lining of her
skull. She had visitors.