"Rudy Rucker - Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

"A nonlinear projection of three-space to two-space," burbles Harna, feeling the paper all over. "Such a
clever map. Who's the author?"

"Hieronymus Bosch," I murmur. "It's called perspective." I'm half-wondering if my brain has popped and
I'm alone here talking to myself. Maybe I'm about to start fingerpaint-ing the floor with Clorox. Snorting
Ajax up my nose.

"Bosch?" muses Harna. Her voice is fruity and penetrating like my old guidance counselor's. "And I just
know you have a crush on him, Glenda! I can tell. When can I meet him?"

"He lived a long time ago," I whisper. I'm stepping from side to side, trying to find a clear path to the
door.

"Most excellent," Harna is saying. "You'll time-snatch him, and then I can use the time-flaw to
perspective-map your whole spacetime brane down into a sack! Yummy! You are so cute, Glenda. Yes,
I'm going to wrap you up and take you home!"

I get past her and run out into the street. I'm breathing hard, still in my nightgown, now and then looking
over my shoulder. So of course a San Jose police car pulls over and sounds me on their speaker. They
think I'm a tweaker or a nut-job. Did I mention that it's Sunday morning?

"Ma'am. Can we help you? Ma'am. Please come over to the police car and place your hands on the
hood. Ma'am." More cop-voice crackle in the background and here comes Harna down the sidewalk,
still shaped like a flying jellyfish, though bigger than before. The cops can't see her, though.

"Ma'am." One of them gets out of the car, a kid with a cop mustache. He looks kind, concerned, but his
hand is on the butt of his Taser.

I whirl, every cop's image of a madwoman, pointing back down the sidewalk at the swollen Haraa, who's
shaping herself into a damn good replica of the cops' car. She's made of glowing haze and hanging at an
angle to the ground.

Right before the cop grabs my wrist or Tasers me, Harna sweeps over and—pixie-dust! I'm riding in a
Gummi-Bear cop car, with Harna talking to me from the radio grill. The cops don't see me anymore.
Harna heads down the street, then swerves off parallel to spacetime. She guns her mill and we're
rumbling through a wah-wah collage of years and centuries, calendar leaves flying, the sun flickering off
and on, Earth rushing around the Sun in a blur. And it's not just time we're traveling through, we're rolling
through some miles as well. We arrive in the Lowlands of 1475.

It's a foggy dawn, Jerome Bosch is at his bedroom window, arcing a stream of pee toward the glow of
the rising sun. I know from books that Hieronymus was just his fancy show name, and that his homies
called him Jerome. Like my given name is Guadalupe—but everyone calls me Glenda. Seeing the man in
the window, my heart does a little handstand. My love has guided us all this way.

"He is scrumptious," says Harna.

As he lowers his nightshirt, Jerome's gaze drifts away from the horizon—and he sees us. His expression
is calm, resigned—it's like he's always been expecting a flying jellyfish/cop-car carrying a good-looking
woman from the next millennium. Calm, yes, but he's moving back from the window hella fast.