"starofep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Eric)

A flash of emerald anger. "I said I liked your show."

"And I said-"

"Abe," she smiled, serious. "I know you want to flux again..."

I looked at her, guarded. She had it wrong, but only just.

So I said, "How...?"

She grinned at me. "I experienced your show good, Abe. Your need was in there. Those fools might not have read it, but I did."

Then I saw the teflon protuberance at the base of her skull. I lifted a tress of hair, fingered sockets worn smooth through use.

"Who are you?" I whispered.

"I'm just another German-Turk from Dusseldorf," she shrugged, "with a taste for sick theatrics."

I smiled and shook my head.

"You still don't recognize? How about if I wore a pierrot suit and a big tear," she said, "here."

"Jo?"

"Jodie Schimelmann."

I felt a tremor inside. This was the kid who'd rocked me with haunting visions of death. She was fifteen years-old and she'd stared oblivion in the face and she was still here.

I'd be ninety in a month and I felt a burning sense of shame at the injustice.

"I need your help," she said.

I shook my head. "How can I possibly help you?"

So she told me why she was dying.

Until six months ago Jodie worked in the spaceyards at Orly. She was a flux-monkey, an engineer whose job it was to crawl inside the exhaust ventricles of bigships and carry out repairs on the auxiliary burners. It was hard work, but she didn't complain; she lived well and saved enough creds to send home to her mother in Germany.

Then one check-up she was found to have contracted some complicated virus that had lodged as spores in the flux-vent of a bigship she had worked on. She was given a year to live, paid off and discharged. Jodie was rotting inside with some alien analogue of carcinoma that had attacked her marrow, lymph glands, lungs and trachea... It was a miracle she was still alive and active, but she loaded herself with analgesics every day and went on fighting.

The disease explained her voice, of course, and the fact that she wore a wig. Ironic that that which was killing her also gave her the appearance of someone much older, while in her head she had matured as well.

I said, "Isn't there a cure?"

"Yeah, sure there is. But a cure costs creds, Abe. And not even my pay off was enough."

I recalled her words. "How can I help you?"

"I need creds. I want the cure. I also want to be beautiful-"