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

"Do you come from a dysfunctional family?" asked the new rector's wife. They had
come to introduce themselves, to I earn "about your needs and how the church can
help you," they had said. The rector's wife had the competent air of a good
nurse who expects cooperation.

"No . . . not really," She had backed into her chair as far as she could; she
flinched inwardly from the rector's wife's expression. They would already know,
she supposed. They would already have made their judgments. "My -- uh -- parents
were divorced, but aside from that --" That was not something most people could
put aside, but she still felt that society's reaction m divorce, especially in
school, had done her more harm than the divorce itself. Now it was fashionable
to have, come from a dysfunctional family; back then only perfection would do.
She distrusted the change in attitude.



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"Aahh." A knowing professional sound, judgment made and rendered all in one.
Efficient. "Are you all right, really?"

She was all right, really. She had learned to ignore the shimmering edges, the
sudden disruption of vision into fragmented, faceted forms (easier, now, with
computer graphics so common -- she could tell herself firmly that her visual
computer was malfunctioning), even the strangeness that made her own house, her
own family, so disturbing. Migraine aura. That's all it was, and the association
with a childhood event purely accidental. No alcoholism, no drug addiction, no
physical or sexual or emotional abuse. You've got nothing to complain about,
said the anonymous voice. You're lucky. Luck being, as it were, her only
handicap.

"Really all right," she repeated, hoping it was only once. "Fine." The rector's
wife had begun to glitter dangerously; perhaps she would leave before she turned
into an abstraction of planes and angles of beaten gold. The rector's wife would
be terrifying as an insect, vast and intrusive; she would have grasping claws
and the impersonal determination of a mantis dissecting a grasshopper for lunch.
She must have said something else, because the rector was talking now, replying,
it seemed, to something she had said. Something about her father. She blinked,
hoping to resolve the pattern of bright dots and dark ones into something
recognizable. The rector had dark hairs on the backs of his hands, and
fingernails neatly dipped.

"-- ought to tell him how you feel," the rector said. "Or that's a kind of
lying, too, isn't it? Concealing things? One should be honest . . ."

As a child, perhaps, A child craving attention. A child honestly curious. A
child putting together those two childish things . . . instead of putting away
childish things . . . and thereby releasing . . . whatever she had released. She