"Gardner Dozois - Machines of Loving Grace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

sharp. No nicks in it, like the ones she used to shave her legs. She’d saved this one
special. Orange sunlight refracted along the honed edge of the blade.
The bathtub was only inches away on her right, its head to the toilet. Without
getting up, she leaned over, turned on the hot-water tap. Let the water run. This early
it was reluctant: the water sputtered, the pipes knocked. But after a while it began to
run hot. A thin wisp of steam. She put her arm under the hot water and sliced her
wrist, holding the razor between thumb and forefinger. Clumsily, she switched hands
and sliced her other wrist. Then she dropped the blade. Her wrists stung dully, and
she felt a spreading warmth and wetness. She lifted her arms away from the water.
Blood, welling up in thick clots, running down her arms toward the elbows.
To be free, she thought.
She sat with her arms held over the tub, palms up. Already it was better; the
pressure that had been trying to turn her into someone else was receding. She
wouldn’t go crazy this time. She tilted her arms up to help the flow. She noticed that
the shower curtain had a pattern of yellow swans and fountains on it, that there was a
quarterfull plastic bottle of shampoo and a bit of melted soap in the bath shelf. A big
glob of blood splattered against the porcelain bottom of the tub. The flowing water
stretched it out elastically, tugged at it, swept it loose and swirled it down the drain.
Too slow. The Lysol had been faster.
She fumbled for the razor blade, dropped it, wiped her hand dry on the
shower curtain, picked it up again. She tilted her head back, felt for the big vein in
her throat, located it with a finger. Very carefully, she positioned the razor blade.
Then she closed her eyes and hacked with all her strength.
The control light flittered on the Big Board: green dulled to amber, died to red,
guttered out completely. A siren began to scream. The duty tech put down his
magazine, winced at the metallic wailing, and touched the arm of his chair.
Pneumatics hissed, the chair moved up and then sideways along the scaffolding,
ghosting past thousands of unwinking green eyes set in horizontal rows, rows
stacked in fifty-by-fifty-foot banks, banks filling the walls of the hexagonal
Monitoring Complex, each tiny light in the walls in the banks in the rows representing
the state of the life-system of one person in this sector of the City.
The tech found the deader easily: one blank spot in a solid wall of green—like
a missing tooth, like the empty eye socket of a skull. He read the code symbols from
the plaque above the dead light, relayed them through his throat mike to the duty
runner down on the floor. “Got that?” “Check.” Below, in Dispatching, the runner
would be feeding the code symbols into a records computer, getting the coordinates
of the deader’s address, sending a VHF pulse out to the activated monitor in the
deader’s body, the monitor replying with a pulse of its own so that the computer
could check by triangulation that the deader was actually at his home address and
then flash confirmation to the runner. The whole process took about a minute. Then
the runner, fingers racing over a keyboard, would relay the coordinates to the
sophisticated robot brain of the meat wagon, flick the activating switch, and the
pickup squad would whoosh out over the private government monorail system that
webbed the City’s roofs.
The duty tech hung from the scaffolding, twenty feet above the floor, three
feet away from the banked lights of the Big Board. He settled back against the black
leather cushions of his chair, waiting for the official confirmation. The siren had been
cut off. He was bored. He nudged at the blank light with the toe of his shoe. Idly, he
began to read the code symbols again. Somehow they seemed familiar.
The runner’s voice buzzed in his head. “Dispatched.” “Confirmed,” the tech