"Rajnar Vajra - His Hands Pass Like Clouds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vajra Rajnar)

casual tone. "I've been expecting you for weeks."
"Sorry, Joe, I've been meaning to get down here since I got back, but
-- did you hear what happened to me?"
"Certainly. Your parents keep in close touch with their friends here,
do they not?"
I stared at the Cloudman's homely profile and thought about the
absolute trust the neighborhood had placed in him and the countless happy days
I'd spent under his clouded but watchful eye. This man was _important_ to me
and I'd never fully appreciated it.
"Uncle Joe, I've ... I've missed you. Terribly."
"Bless you for saying so. I've missed you too. You were a delightful
child. Intelligent and good-hearted and always so _inventive_."
"Inventive? Oh. You mean about causing trouble? Jesus! How
embarrassing. I never thought about it from your point of -- I must have
caused you one hell of a lot of grief."
"Why be embarrassed? I knew you were doing it for your hand."
For the second time tonight, goose bumps sprang to attention. The back
of my neck tingled.
"You were _aware_ of the effect you were having? That's ... very
interesting."




Page 5
 I stared down at the little water-filled atomizer the painter used to
keep his paints moist as they sat on the tray, but found no answers. Children
easily accept things adults would find incredible and I wasn't a child any
more...
"I don't get it, Joe. What are you? Some kind of healer?"
The old man sighed deeply and the breeze carried a faint scent of
gingerbread to me. "These days, I'm only a painter. I have no great aptitude
for healing. There are dying singers whose voices are far stronger than mine,
but they are elsewhere and I am here. So be it. We have made your left hand
into our private channel. Why don't you take my hand now, as you used to, and
we will see if your legs will dance to my feeble song."
So I did it, held his right hand with my left and felt awkward and
foolish -- until my knees suddenly began to tingle. I couldn't think of a
thing to say and wasn't even sure what to think, so I just scratched my legs
surreptitiously and watched the man paint.
He'd lost none of his skills, but his art appeared different in the
moonlight. Although it was nearly midnight and the moon was getting low, the
night was so clear and my vision so adjusted, that the sky was surprisingly
bright. There were clouds up there, puffy cumulous jobs, but not too many.
They were as still as if they'd been nailed to the stars.
The matching clouds in Joe's painting were extraordinary. They were
obviously modeled on the real ones, but the artist had taken liberties. The
faint extrusions on the painted billowy edges seemed close to forming
recognizable shapes, and the intensity of light in the centers made the clouds
suggest distant nebulae or coalescing galaxies.