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

Sure enough, Jerome starts racing around the room like a cockroach when the light comes on, pausing
only long enough to ask me to get him more paint.

When I come back from the Art Mart with a shopping bag of paint tubes, he's already roughed in an
underpainting of the street—the houses with their tile and shingle roofs, the untrimmed palm trees, the
dead dingy cars, the vines, a few passers-by captured in motion, the tops of the houses in the next block,
the houses after them, the low brown haze from the freeways, and beyond that the golden-grassed
foothills and the blank blue sky.

He's all over the wall, and the painting is so perfect and beautiful I can hardly stand it. Every ten seconds,
it seems like, he darts over to the window, then darts back. He's such a nut that he's putting in every
single person and car that goes past, so the picture is getting more and more crowded.

The sun is going down and a few lights come on in the windows outside. Somehow Jerome is keeping up
with it, changing his painting to match the world, touching the buildings with sunset gold, damping the
shadows into warmer shades, pinkening the sky—and then darkening it.

A fat full moon comes up over the foothills and, quick as a knife, Jerome paints it onto my wall, sprinkling
stars all around it.

And then Harna's in the room again.
"It's enough," she says. "He can stop."

Jerome cranks down to normal speed. I hand him more Oreos and coffee. He slugs down the
nourishment, then drinks a quart of water from the sink.

"What happens now?" I ask Hama.

"Like I said before," she answers, not looking so much like a human anymore. Her pink skin is peeling
away in patches, and underneath she's green. "I'm going to bag you and your world and take you home.
Don't worry, it won't hurt."

And then she shoots out of the window and disappears into the distance past the moon.

"We have to stop her!" I tell Jerome, picking up my purse.

"What?" he says. He sounds tired.

"We have to run after Harna."

Jerome looks at me for a long time. And then he smiles. "If you say so, Glenda. Being with you is
interesting."

The two of us run down the apartment stairs and right away I can see that things are seriously weird. The
cars across the street are two-thirds as big as the cars on my side.

"Hurry," I tell Jerome, and we run around the corner to the next block. The houses on that next street are
half the size of the houses on my street. We run another block, which takes only a couple of seconds, as
each block is way smaller than the one before. The houses are only waist high. We go just a little farther
and now we're stepping right over the houses, striding across a block at a time.