"Richard Powers - The Gold Bug Variations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powers Richard)

how Franklin and I kept warm, and treated it
as easily the most explicable of winter
mysteries. At his finger-points, the arcade of
frosted branches became vault ribbing. His
each wave populated the landscape, pulling
Chinese lanterns out of flat sheets. He
crumpled to his knees in the snow, shook his
head in incomprehension, and like the
crystal world, seemed about to splinter. He
must have solved again, with fierce looking,
the ladder of inheritance, because his face
turned and he swung his eyes on us
expectantly.
Piled in blankets, I slowed the dream, kept
him from speaking, prolonged the
endangered moment that would shatter at
the least formula. His throat tensed; his lips
moved soundlessly like a remedial reader. He
became that pump organ we had played
six-hands, about to produce the one phrase
sufficient to hymn this mass of brute
specifics. The traces of creatures, all the
elaborating trills and mordants of winter
seemed a single score, one breathing
instrument whose sole purpose was to beat
the melodic line of its own
instructions—four phrases, four seasons,
every gene the theory of its own exposition.
He was about to hum, in a few notes, the
encoded thread of everything happening to
us and everything that would fail to happen.
But his lips—thin, boyish, blue, wasted in
middle age—could not shake loose the first
pitch.
As before, Franklin challenged him.
"You're the life scientist. Tell us what's afoot
here." Every detail of Ressler's face grew
magnified: the interstate lines of folded
neck, his frozen-brittle lobes, the spot on his
chin thawed by breath. His viscera, the
process even then growing more variegated,
already knew the tumor. This time Dr. Ressler
gave no reply. He had gone, slipped out
from under the weight of white.
Then, this morning, just waiting for me to
commit wrongly, summer chose its moment
to break. The pressure system stalled above
the city passed over, at last bringing the
weather the calendar called for.
Overbundled in the airless room, I woke up