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

Resting there, thinking things over, I can visualize them, pointy-nosed with beating tails, talking to each
other in Dutch, enjoying themselves in Glenda-land, on a pilgrimage to my Garden of Earthly Delights.

He keeps on sleeping, and I amble back into the kitchen to make myself a grilled cheese sandwich. I'm
happy, but at the same time I have this bad feeling that Harna somehow tricked me. That stuff about
wrapping me up and taking me home. Some weird shit is gonna come down, I just know it.

But now here comes Jerome out the bedroom, looking mellower than before. Our little hump and cuddle
has helped his mind-set.

"Greetings, Glenda," he says. "I enjoyed our venery."

"Likewise." He looks so cute and inquisitive that I run over and kiss his cheek. And I can't help asking,
"You don't think I'm too fat?"
"You're well-fed," he says, cupping my boobs. "Clean and healthy. But do you worship Satan? Your
spirit-familiar Harna—surely she is unholy."

"I don't know much about Harna," I admit. "She only appeared today. And Satan? Naw, dog. I'm a
Catholic girl." Fallen away, I don't mention. I cross myself and he's relieved.

"I can go home?" he asks, glancing out the window at the quiet street in the noon sun.

"You belong with me," I tell him. "I'll give you a baby. You never had one back then. I love your art.
You're mucho famous here, you know. I have a whole book of your pictures."

I root around the apartment, wanting to show him, but damn it, that book is totally gone. I'm guessing that
Harna took it. She was saying something about copying Jerome's perspective maps so she can—fit our
world into a sack? That has to be wack. If only she's gone for good. Maybe hoping hard enough can
make it so. I skip over to Jerome and kiss him again. He lets me.

"I can't find my book, but we can go to the SJSU library," I tell him. "It's just across the campus and
they're open on Sunday. And I think the Art Mart is open today too. I'll buy you some paint."

"Buy paint?" says Jerome. "I mix my own."

"We get it in tubes," I say. "Like sausage. Ready-made. Here, you eat a grilled cheese sandwich too, and
then we'll look for Hieronymus Bosch books in the library."

Well, guess what we find under bosch, hieronymus, in the library? Not jack shit. When Harna and I
abducted him from the fifteenth-century Dutch town of s'Hertogenbosch and carried him to twenty-first
century San Jose, California, we wiped out his role in history. Maybe he finished one or two minor
paintings before we nabbed him, but as far as the history of art is concerned, he never lived. Jerome
doesn't really pick up on how weird this is—I mean all he's seen me do is look at an
incomprehensible-to-a-medieval-mind online card catalog, and we nabbed him before he was famous
anyway, so he's not feeling the loss. But me, I feel it bad.

Bosch was a really important artist, you know—or maybe you don't. Come to think of it, I might be the
only one who remembers our world before I changed our history. But take it from me, Hieronymus
Bosch was King. The Elvis of artists. His work influenced a lot of people in all kinds of ways over the
centuries.