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

knew better than to say that; she had said too much already. She walked them
from the houses they smiled and waved. They had left their packet of wisdom for
her. Honesty, forgiveness, love, wrapped in shining paper with shining ribbons
around it. Her mind plucked at the glittering bows.

But it was not hers. It belonged to someone else. She glanced around, feeling
unseen eyes. They had been blue, she remembered. Clear blue, and the whites very
white, only a slight rim of red at the edge of the eyelid, probably from the
smoke. Below his eyes a gray stain of sadness, the flesh sagging away from the
bones. He had had one crooked front tooth, and some steel caps when he spoke
that reflected points of light. It's not me that won't forgive, she said
silently to the car that had long since driven away.

Around her, the gray blocks piled up, neatly, inexorably. The time she had said
something about Emily's nose, the time she had snapped at Laura, the time she
had lied about the check being in the mail. Days of plenty and peace, days of
happiness, days when she had not thought of him at all, each one a gray stone
walling her in. Stupid questions, cruel remarks, each a spike fixed in the
stones, pointing inward. Clumsiness, inattention, laziness: the complaints of
her teachers. Pride, insensitivity, selfishness: the complaints of her spiritual
leaders. Hypersensitivity, priggishness: the complaints of her friends.

She looked at her arms, unsurprised to find them covered with blue numbers, zero
to infinity, all she had done wrong and failed to do right. Her head shuddered
and split into wedges, like a chopped tomato. Each wedge, impaled on a spike,
had its own faceted eyes with which to see, and what remained of her voice rose
from the soggy puddle of juice at the joining of the wedges. Sorry, it said, in
a child's tremulous whisper. I'm sorry. Being sorry is not enough, said the
voice she would never quite forget, in the language she had never heard before.
She knew the meaning though. She always did.

Her usual reluctance to confront numbers suggested the mail as an escape. A pile


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of bills, advertisements, and two magazines. She picked up the magazine and
flipped it open.

She had scarcely looked at the picture when her vision blurred; with no warning
aura, the migraine invaded, overfilling her skull, pressing cruel thumbs on her
eyeballs. She squinted at the magazine anyway. A black and white photograph
danced on the page like a clipping on the wind.

Blurred face, sad eyes, lines of age and pain. She could not read the obituary,
not really . . . she had never known his name; she had never remembered his
profession. This was not the same man, could not be. One word only resolved into
letters, quivering. She had seen that name in school, under the pictures of dead
men stacked like firewood, a few survivors' masklike faces. Those faces shifted,