"Alexander Jablokov - Doing The Circuit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jablokov Alexander)

Glass is a terrible substance for teeth. That's what my nine-fingered dentist told me, anyway. Pingree has
the shattered pieces of a rose window from the west front of some defunct medieval cathedral in her
mouth. I understand she's getting slow lead poisoning from it: peripheral neuropathy, saturnine gout, renal
failure, the works. Her fans imitate her pained gouty shuffle, her dropped wrists, her inane, slurred
speech. But when she clicks on that halogen bulb that has replaced her uvula, all is forgiven. Her mouth
glows like the Age of Faith.

"Wonderful," I say, not meaning it.
I look out into the Club and see her. Laurie.

She's racking the lat pulldown machine. An overhead spot picks out her nostrils. Laurie's nares have
been heavily modified, into an arrangement that resembles a bat wing, reinforced with ribs of cartilage.
When she runs they flare out into an oxygen-packing ramjet, filling her lungs with compressed air. Laurie
is a lightning bolt made flesh.

"Do you have someone?" Fiona asks.

"I did," I answer.

I abandon Fiona to a museum-quality replica of a sixteenth- century Spanish interrogation rack to
practice disjointing and limb lengthening. She needs to think about her ultimate goals a little more. I'm not
sure I like her attitude.

#

I first met Laurie on a field trip. The Club sends its trainers out once a year, to maintain a presence in the
wider world of exercise. That year it was the high valleys of the Pamirs.

I remember being crammed into the fuselage of a C-130 Hercules. They kept us sedated for the long
flight up from Delhi: hyped and steroidal trainers tend to fight furiously in such close quarters, causing
debilitating injury. Last trip we had been transported by an old Soviet Alfa-class submarine to the Arctic.
That was a rough crossing. When we finally clambered out onto the ice cap, we were a mess. One sight
of the twitching, shattered limbs of their star trainers as they slid stickily across the ice, easy prey for the
polar bears that were their intended wrestling targets, and the Club owners had made a new policy of
strict drip sedation.

Through my headachy haze I could hear the turbo-props laboring in the thin air. An air crew member ran
down the narrow aisle between the rows of trainers and slapped an epinephrine/methedrine ampoule on
each neck as he passed. We came to life, howling and growling. He made it into the welded shark cage
at the back with only a few superficial wounds, slammed the hatch, and cowered inside. A buzzer and a
red light, and we mounted our carbon-fiber-framed mountain bikes.

That was the first glimpse I caught of Laurie. She was new to the team, though we'd heard good things
about her. She was a single-muscle specialist. She'd work intently with a client, building and sculpting one
head of a quad or a specific back erector muscle. It's patient, intense work. I saw one particular pair of
sternocleidomastoids she'd coached, so pumped and huge they stuck out from the sides of the neck like
wings and made the client's head look like a cherry on a sundae. Very impressive.

The bomb-bay doors opened and we fell out, whooping. We floated down, front wheels up, and
slammed to the mountain tundra, carving holes in the delicate centuries-old growth, our dual oil