"Kathleen Ann Goonan - The Bones of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

turning he waved back. She walked past the hissing fountain and
summoned the maglift with a glance.
As she opened the door of her apartment on the forty-third floor, it
was like walking into a dream from her high-tech childhood. She
kept her real work here, away from the damp and clutter of Nana’s
old house.
Laid out before her were the lights of Honolulu, beautiful as stars
through the smartglass that formed the condo’s skin. She walked
over and touched it; the place she touched responded with her
personal preset preferences as to temperature and lighting. She
touched the window icon a few times and all the windows opened.
Tourist skims with tiny colored lights cruised past Ala Moana on
the dark ocean. The fireworks in the Tourist Zone over by Waikiki,
silent and tiny with distance, were almost over. She was just in time
for the grand finale—the familiar ritual of a solar-sailed ship
disappearing toward the stars, the Interspace logo.
The vectored room, roughly a trapezoid with a kitchen at the back,
was sparsely furnished: a computer, some pillows scattered across
the carpeted floor, a low black table.
 She dropped onto a pile of pillows in front of a wraparound blank
screen; she preferred holo and used the screen for background. She
touched on her computer and sank into what was the true joy of her
life: information.
Interior information. The small things. The luminescence of the
twining strands of DNA, the minuscule iota of information that
flooded the electronic journals and the secret reaches of the IS web.
Her screen was a 180-degree arc. She could holo any aspect of it she
wanted, project it from the curve of the screen and make it pirouette.
Her fingers hovered over the glowing keys as if they were the keys
of a piano that she was going to play, gathering the notes within
her, letting the force of the entire piece fill her being, as her
long-ago teacher had taught her, before her fingers even began to
move.
She remembered the boy’s face in perfect detail. She shivered, and
considered how best to scramble her tracks in this night’s work.
Then she began.
The first, and easiest, thing to do was something she had done
since childhood, a game she had played with her brothers. She
composited the face and told her computer to find it.
She was not surprised to find it three years ago in an old HV
newscast. Perhaps as a warning to the Homeland Movement,
Interspace had not suppressed the fact that this child—his body, his,
the one Lynn had seen a week ago but reduced by Lynn now
holographically to a six-inch-long body—lay sprawled on the road
out on Hawaii’s North Shore. His head was bent at an angle that
sickened Lynn. Hit-and-run. He was dead.
Of course, it was not him. This boy, and the one Lynn had seen,
were both clones.
She quickly moved to hypertext the news. Since she was very
young she had moved through the intricately coded IS web like a