"Rudy Rucker & Marc Laidlaw - The Perfect Wave" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

smoking cigarettes, drawing in an art-quality notebook, and admiring him.
She wears a carved black coral tiki-goddess head on a Day-Glo red string
around her neck.

Zep is handsome, in a street-worn, unshaven way. Kaya wears her
hair in a blonde Bettie Page bob—or, no, that’s not her hair, it’s a wig. Her
eyebrows are shaved off and replaced by fanciful drawn-on lines. Her face
is young, her front teeth large and rabbity. She wears a flowing paisley
pashmina-size scarf across her shoulders against the cooling evening air.

Resting beside Kaya are three cartons of spray-paint cans, and next
to the cartons are the couple’s freshly spraypainted bicycles, fat-tire
beaters with stuffed saddle bags. Zep’s bike is now green, Kaya’s yellow. A
garish science fiction novel and a computer science textbook peep from
Zep’s saddlebags, also a soldering iron and a voltmeter. Visible in the open
tops of Kaya’s bags are a Tarot deck, the brass stalk of a pocket bong, a
plastic Ziploc bag of granola, a tea-kettle spout, the corner of a silky purple
sleeping bag, also pliers and a screwdriver. Kaya’s bicycle has a tiny motor
jury-rigged to its rear wheel, with a little cylinder of gas connected to the
motor.

Zep’s bicycle has a rack welded to one side, and snugged into the
rack is his peculiar translucent gray surfboard, with an irregular dark shape
embedded within its center. The board’s surface is rough and sticky. It, too,
has been recently decorated by the spray-can: the name “Chaos Attractor”
rainbows across it in loose script.

Zep has already covered the concrete-block wall with a blue sky
background dotted with red-tinged white clouds. And now, holding a dirty
handkerchief over his mouth with one hand, he dances along the wall,
swinging a can of green spray-paint up and down in great arcs—limning the
requisite image of a perfect wave.

“Slower,” said Kaya in a gentle tone. “Don’t rush it, Zep.”

“I want transparency,” says Zep through his handkerchief. “So the sky
shows through. I’ll build up the base of the wave one layer at a time.” He
jitters back and forth till the can is empty, selects a fresh can, begins
shaking it, and hunkers down by Kaya’s side.

Kaya shows her notebook to him. “Look, I figured out how to position
Cheezemore Ratt on a board. You’re lucky you met me yesterday, huh?”

Surprise: the pages of Kaya’s notebook are completely covered with
astounding da Vinci-like drawings: a flow diagram of the air currents inside a
cloud, a schematic for a small motor of novel design, a sketch of a
twin-peaked quantum wave function, an image of Zep as a skeleton, and a
fetching sketch of Kaya riding down the face of an enormous wave.

“Whoa,” says Zep. “I’m flabbergasted.”