"William Gibson - Spook Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

She heard Odile Richard’s robot bump lightly against something, from the direction of the bathroom.

“It’s three there,” he said. “Did I wake you?”

“No,” she lied.

Odile’s robot was made of Lego, white Lego exclusively, with some odd number of black-tired white
plastic wheels underneath, and what she assumed were solar power cells screwed across its back. She
could hear it moving patiently, however randomly, across the carpet of her room. Could you buy
white-only Lego? It looked right at home here, where lots of things were white. Nice contrast with the
Aegean-blue table legs.

“They’re ready to show you his best piece,” Rausch said.

“When?”

“Now. She’s waiting for you at her hotel. The Standard.”

Hollis knew the Standard. It was carpeted in royal-blue Astroturf. Whenever she went there she felt as
though she were the oldest living thing in the building. There was a sort of giant terrarium, behind the
registration desk, in which ethnically ambiguous bikini-girls sometimes lay as if sunning themselves, or
studying large, profusely illustrated textbooks.

“Have you taken care of the billing here, Philip? When I checked in, they still had it on my card.”

“It’s been taken care of.”

She didn’t believe him. “Do we have a deadline on this story yet?”

“No.” Rausch sucked his teeth, somewhere in a London she couldn’t be bothered imagining. “The launch
has been rolled back. August.”

Hollis had yet to meet anyone from Node, or anyone else who was writing for them. A European version
of Wired, it seemed, though of course they never put it that way. Belgian money, via Dublin, offices in
London—or, if not offices, then at least this Philip. Who sounded to her as though he were seventeen.
Seventeen and with his sense of humor surgically excised.

“Plenty of time,” she said, not certain what she meant, but thinking, however obliquely, of her bank
balance.

“She’s waiting for you.”

“Okay.” She closed her eyes and clamshelled her phone.

Could you, she wondered, be staying in this hotel and technically still be considered homeless? It felt like
you could, she decided.

She lay there under a single white sheet, listening to the French girl’s robot bumping and clicking and
reversing. It was programmed, she supposed, like one of those Japanese vacuum cleaners, to keep
bumping until the job was done. Odile had said it would be collecting data with an onboard GPS unit;