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

merged into faces from later pictures, later wars, flickered through her mind in
an endless stream: men, women, children, babies, bodies, mouths gaping, eyes
wide or closed in death, crowds behind barbed wire, single prisoners bunched in
cells, eyes glistening in the camera's flash, staring at her, through the lens
and flickering shutter, with that expression she had never forgotten, that
disbelief, that horror, that disgust.

The migraine squeezed itself, contracting to a single point of pain in midbrain.
She grunted, as if someone had slugged her belly. Nothing was enough, nothing
would ever be enough. She thought, as always too late, what she could have said
to the rector's smiling wife: "No, not a dysfunctional family. A dysfunctional
world."

With the suddenness of a pricked soap bubble, the migraine disappeared, leaving
her unbalanced, almost giddy.

She laid the magazine on her desk, atop the piles of bank statements, the
half-finished tax return. She felt warm and moist, a loaf of bread new-baked,
steaming slightly. While her head was clear, while she could think, she would
try to finish the taxes. Such respites, rare proof of the reality of miracles,
lasted at most a few hours.

The numbers lay quiet, their meaning leached of danger, no more remarkable than
a collection of letters. She fed them into the calculator, copied them, added
and subtracted as the directions specified. The result had a certainty she had
never associated with numbers, a feeling of solidity so new that it surprised
her into noticing.

Tentatively, she let her mind visualize a number: just a number, not a dark mark
on white skin. A cascade of them, in the bright pastels of her childhood's
books, tumbled over each other, eager as puppies. Little yellow fives, soft
lavender fours, orange threes, blue twos, fat white marshmallow ones, no longer
scintillating in dangerous light, but docile, friendly, even affectionate. She
felt as if she had stumbled into a strange universe where all the familiar rules
changed.

In one blinding flash more intrusive than even the migraine, she saw the book
itself, its pages smudged and worn at the edges, its pictures simple and
innocent and harmless. Her own hand, none too clean (her adult eye recognized
grape jelly and peanut butter) spread starfish-wise, her own voice piping "I
like one and I like two and . . . that makes three, Mommy!"

So she had not always hated numbers; she had not always been driven to blind
panic by the operation of one upon another. Had that panic come from her
question, which even now loomed worse than the pain of migraines? She shivered,
hoping as always that she would not remember it. But the numbers themselves
surrounded her, touched her hands, stroked her head; softly, gently,
insistently, they urged her through that final door where the terrible question
lay, coiled malice, proof of iniquity beyond forgiveness, steeped in a poison