"Hutchinson, Dave - Tir-na-nOg" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hutchinson Dave)

"I hear strange things from the Land of the Rising Sun," he said at one point.

"What's new?" When we were young, Japan was the place the miracles came from. Now Hey was making miracles himself, and Japan was the Competitor, the Bogeyman.

"The rumor is that the Nipponese have managed to copy the personality of an orangutan onto a couple of thousand terabytes of read-only memory."

"I didn't think orangutans had personalities."

He snorted. "You've never kept one, obviously. I'm reliably informed that they have more personality than some major soap-opera stars."

"But why bother?"

He looked round the bar, smiling. He was dressed for the street: baggy orange pantaloons tucked into calf-length chamois boots, an oxblood leather duster coat, and a pointy little hat with a huge floppy brim. It was as if someone had slipped Gandalf a particularly potent designer drug.

"It'd be cheap to keep," he said finally. "You could buy the ROM, plug it into your entertainment set, switch on the hologram projector, and you'd have your very own orangutan, live and direct."

"I think I'll stick with my cat, thanks a lot."

He grinned beatifically at me. "Prosaic, Monkey," he said. "No imagination."

I took a drink of warm, flat beer. "Shall we talk about what I did at school today?"

"Don't be silly, Monkey," he said. "It's my birthday and I've just kicked Turing into a cocked hat. Let's talk about me."

Those, of course, were the days when his masters still let him walk free.




· · · · ·


Once, when I was young and in my first teaching job, I took part in a car treasure hunt around the green and leafy lanes of Kent. That's how long ago it was: Kent still had lanes that were green and leafy. It was the sort of thing where you go to a village, solve a list of clues, and from the answers decipher the location of the next village in the chain. And so on. Alastair, my driver, demonstrated an almost cosmological calm when faced with my inept navigation and an ancient and continually-stalling Passat. We saw a lot of Kent that day, and by accident we also saw quite a lot of East Sussex.
Whenever we ran into one of the other teams taking part, Alastair and I would try to throw them off the scent by examining some imaginary clue or by pretending to go off in entirely the wrong direction. Most of the time, we were going off in the wrong direction.

Benedict and I have been on our own treasure hunt, following Hey's trail from Grantbridge House to a flat in the Barbican; from a squat near the Cromwell Road to a pirate chip factory high up in the Pennines; from a cottage in the Lincolnshire Wolds, where there was recent evidence of some kind of workshop and an empty delivery case which had once held a little nuclear battery … and so on. To here.

We are, apparently, not alone in our search for Hey. Not only are there other search teams sent out by his masters, but the Competitors also want him, or at least what he knows.

In order to throw other searchers off the trail, Benedict and I are booked into the hotel on the banks of the loch as Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, which is certainly not my real name and probably isn't Benedict's either. It seems a pretty transparent piece of misdirection to me, but Benedict claims to know what she's doing.

For appearances' sake, we have a double room. She sleeps in the bed, I sleep on the floor. It's an arrangement that suits us both. She thinks I'm an idiot; for my part, I have a wife and a fifteen-year-old daughter, the AIDS vaccine is still over four thousand pounds for a course of five shots, and I would much rather climb into bed with a dead shark than sleep with Benedict.

"Monkey."

I heard her coming that time, her walking boots swishing through the long grass. Either my hearing's improving or she just isn't bothering to be quiet any more. I don't even look up, just sit where I am on the septic tank's inspection cover, flipping my little CD-ROM like a rainbow-plated coin.

"Will you stop doing that?"