"Joe Haldeman - Buying Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

There can't be many immortals who are "natural" drug addicts, their chromosomes lined up so as to
make them need it no matter what. People with that affliction don't put together their first million.
People like Claudia just get physically bored, I guess. Grief turns you inside out, but nobody was ever
bored by it. Cream just makes you into a sex machine, as far as I can tell: very intense orgasms refreshed
at will. After a few years you're impotent without it, though; not a great selling point.
I would have thought Claudia would go for dizney, if any drug. She always liked exotic places. With
dizney you can visit a dozen solar systems without leaving your chair, always different ones. Some
people never quite get back, of course.
Dizney and grief are more potent to immortals than phems, they say; a lot of drugs affect us differently.
And it varies from individual to individual; aspirin deadens my sense of smell, but I've never heard of
that happening to anybody else. Eric Lundley, an Australian immortal who once was my business
partner, got auditory hallucinations from antihistamines.
I wondered how many of the forty or so people here were immortals. A few I recognized; a few more
were obvious from physical modifications, hardheads and strongarms. My own skull was a Kevlar
replacement, but with bone and skin culture grafted over it. Real hair. If I wanted to look like someone
other than Dallas Barr, it was relatively easy. Wouldn't be if the top third of my head was a shiny silver
dome.
I realized that the man I was staring at, a hardhead, had detached himself from a conversation and was
walking toward me. Just in time, I recognized him, and bowed ten and a half degrees.
"Sun of friendship breaking through mist," I said in pretty bad Japanese.


file:///H|/eMule/Incoming/Haldeman,%20Joe%20-%20Buying%20Time(1989)[v1].htm (13 of 219)15-8-2005 0:24:35
 BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman


He answered my bow and greeting and we shook hands. Atsuji Kamachi, the first person I'd called after
I got out of the clinic.
"Hardly recognized you with the silver skullcap."
"Platinum. You should have one."
"Maybe someday." I kept the Kevlar secret. "Feel different?"
"It is colder to the touch, of course, and a bit heavier. When I hit my head on something, the sound is
like a temple gong." He tapped his head twice but it just sounded like knuckles. "Inside, of course."
He looked around and lowered his voice. "I did complete the transaction that you requested." Inscrutable
half-smile.
"A hundred thousand pounds?"
He shook his head. "More than ninety, less than ninety-five. As I told you, steel is soft this quarter, not
only in the East."
"Which made people eager to do business, eh? Some people?"
"Some." He stroked a wisp of white beard. American and Australian immortals tended to look like tennis
players and models; Oriental ones, like sages and empresses. "This Frenchman I dealt with, M. Neuville.
He does not really exist, true?"
"Well … "
"I know the law firm is real." He spoke in an amused, conspiratorial whisper. "But that supposed fortune
is so much gossamer. More margin than substance."
"Kamachi," I said with real pain in my voice.
"Ah." He held up one finger. "I ask you no questions, you tell me no lies. Is that how the saying goes?"
"Exactly."
"Know this, then." He looked to the left and right, elaborately. "A lot of steel will be sold for gossamer
this week, perhaps next week. Singapore."