"Dennis Danvers - Circuit of Heaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Danvers Dennis)

“So what’re you doing today?”

“Sleeping.”

“See you tomorrow morning, then.”

She hung up the phone and pulled her address book out of her bag. She looked through it. It was mostly
empty, nobody in it she could really call a good friend, just acquaintances—other musicians, her agent,
some club owners, little more than voiceless faces in her memory and some of them not even that. She
finished her coffee and went down to the lobby.
HER HOTEL WAS ONE OF THE “RESTORED” ONES OFF DU-pont Circle. In the real world, the
place was a ruin. But in the Bin, the lobby was done up turn-of-the-century with lots of brass and etched
glass and fiber-optic light fixtures sprouting out of sconces.

She went into the restaurant, sat in the corner chewing on a bagel and drinking another cup of coffee,
watching all the tourists and their families planning their days with maps and brochures. She imagined
herself one of the little girls, crawling on her daddy’s lap as he pointed out the pictures of the places they
would go. Behind her, a table burst into laughter, and she rose from her chair and left without looking
back.

I’ll be a tourist myself, she thought—the monuments today, galleries tomorrow, the White House and the
Capitol the next day. I’ve only seen pictures of those places. Maybe I’ll even meet somebody. You
couldn’t tell. They said it was easy in here. They said everything was easy in here.

She spent most of the day going to the monuments—Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Rogers—the
famous dead. But it was the living she watched. Thousands of them. A few were by themselves—busy
people on their way to someplace, or drugged-out zombies who didn’t care where they were going. But
most were with somebody—a friend, a child, a lover. She watched their faces, their hands gesturing, the
way they leaned this way and that as they spoke to each other. The way they sometimes touched.

All the while she kept thinking about Angelina and her dream. The crowded streets. The bright windows.
She’d been inside a world she’d only read about in books or seen in a virtual. She could still smell the
cars and the wet streets. She wondered if she might be cracking up. There were scare stories about
people going into the Bin and breaking up like a virtual in a thunderstorm, that there were flaws in the
crystalline structure of the Bin, and you could find yourself in nightmarish worlds that made no sense,
completely alone. But in my dream, she thought, I wasn’t alone. I was inside Angelina.

BY MIDAFTERNOON, SHE WAS WANDERING THROUGH THE largest and most crowded
monument, the Rogers Memorial. There were exhibits covering every aspect of Newman Rogers’ life,
detailing his every achievement, but the center of attention was an enormous holograph of him, towering
over the central hall, delivering his last speech—the day ALMA went on-line—over and over again.

He was a tiny man, blown up to be forty feet tall. The Savior of Mankind. The podium came to his chest
so that those who stood too close in front couldn’t see his face and had to content themselves with his
baggy pants. His soft, reedy voice echoed through the hall, and though people were jammed in on every
side, the only sounds were shuffling feet, and here and there, someone crying.

Justine worked her way up the escalators to the thirdfloor balcony. She wanted to see his face. By the
time she squeezed into a place at the rail, he was coming to the end of his speech. He took off his glasses