"Kate Wilhelm - The Fountain of Neptune" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

office. She knew it would be on her insurance record, and she never would
be insurable again.

She was forty-two years old and more than likely she would be dead
within six months. So she flew to Rome first class.

She had found an apartment on the Internet, and chose it because it
had Internet access, sparing her the search for a cyber café. Her landlord
thought she was a writer, and in a sense she was. She had spent more than
a decade writing meticulous reports for an R&D department, and now she
began keeping a record of the progression of her inoperable tumor. At first
there was no particular reason, but after she missed her appointment
scheduled for early May, she decided to send the medical record to the
brain surgeons.

The blurred vision came more often, sometimes embarrassingly in
public, more often when she was in her apartment.

She spent one week in Florence, awestruck by David and the Pietà,
overwhelmed by the Tivoli gardens, and the Uffizi museum, but her call had
issued from Rome and she was not tempted to leave again. There were
days in the Vatican museum; operas in a gothic church; days wandering
around the Colosseum, populating the arena with gladiators, the forum with
politicians; a special exhibition of Leonardo’s work reproduced full size; a
close-up view of the Last Supper....

She was in love with Rome, with the streets strewn with litter that
came alive in any breeze, with the gelatos and pizza slices topped with
anything edible, the espresso, all the food. And most of all she was in love
with the magic of its sunlight, the complexity of Rome’s agelessness,
where contemporary glass and steel structures stood side by side with
those from a past of almost inconceivable antiquity—a monument here, a
stele there, remnants of a temple, a statue, the juxtaposition of an
ephemeral flicker in time and the mute eloquent endurance of millennia.

In the evenings she studied Italian, wrote her daily report, and
downloaded her pictures onto her computer, deleted many, manipulated
others, enhanced some, and put the saved images on a CD, to be sent to
her sister eventually.

That evening, the last day of May, she gazed at her latest pictures of
Neptune’s Fountain in Piazza Navona. It was her favorite so far and she had
visited it several times. Neptune doing battle with an octopus and nymphs
mounted on horses rising from the fountain basin. Neptune was as
muscular as a body builder. All the male statues were, and the females
were all lissome, willowy, with not a muscle or bone in sight. The steeds
looked wild and beautiful. But something was wrong.

She looked for previous pictures she had taken of the fountain, then
printed the versions to compare them, find the cause for her unease. It