"Kelly,_James_Patrick_-_Ninety_Percent_of_Everything" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

Aunt Galadriel lived by herself; in the days before cleanbots, she'd kept a house that was sterile enough to recombine DNA in. Aunt Lindsay and Aunt Kym's house, where I grew up, is a mess, so I always felt a vague sense of guilt when I visited Aunt Galadriel, as if by the mere act of breathing I might be disrupting an order she had taken years of hard labor to impose on her environment.
Aunt Galadriel would have approved of the fastidious housekeeping at Laputa. It was the kind of place a man with a weakness for yellow suits would have to live in.
* * * *
Laputa had three donut-shaped levels that surrounded a central utility core. In the core were plumbing, water, and waste storage, heating and ventilation, the VTEMF generator, the homebrain and a 300 kilowatt Pons power plant that provided electricity for the living quarters and heated the helium in the envelope. Most of the floors were done in pliatex which could be varied with firmness from a mudlike consistency to diamond hardness; all of the open walls were pixes, which could display any color or show any scene stored in the computer. Nguyen called up the palette on a sloping wall in the living room to display the 6.7 million available colors. "Personally," he said, "I worry about visual overstimulation, which is why I rarely stray from my defaults. I'm afraid I'm perceptually old-fashioned. I only use the pixwalls to allow clients to get a feel for the possibilities." Above the living quarters was an exterior observation deck, which we skipped; Wetherall did not seem much interested in taking in the view.
Nguyen led us back down to the bottom level, which was divided between the entrance gallery and a conference room. Part of the floor here was the exterior hull itself. As we entered the conference room, he made a section of the deck transparent; the garish splendor of the Strip was spread beneath our feet like a two hundred dollar whore.
"Excuse me, Nguyen." Wetherall was suddenly pale, "but it's awfully warm in here, don't you think? Could we turn up the air-conditioning?"
"We can go as high as a hundred and fifty meters," he said to me as he opaqued the floor, "which is the limit of the phased VTEMF generators in the truck and the core. Unfortunately, some people find the view from this height vertiginous." He smiled. "Just why such a person would want to build a lifthouse is beyond me."
"The view is not a problem," Wetherall said. But he had sunk into a chair and directed his eyes at the ceiling. "Actually, I think I'm getting to like heights," he told the crown molding. "I just have to prepare myself for it."
Nguyen opened a cabinet door, which revealed a rolled up rope ladder with teak treads. "In case of an emergency, you can use this to get down quickly."
"Getting down too quickly is what I'm afraid of," Wetherall said. He loosened his collar and then waved for us to join him. "I'm fine. Let's get started."
* * * *
We sat around the conference table. At its center was a holographic simulation of the Eastline site. Two tiny shitdogs crawled like slugs on the unfinished C pile.
"Our most critical design restraints have to do with lift and control," Nguyen said. "In almost all cases, the envelope will provide enough buoyancy to keep the house aloft, although we should expect that there will be times when the VTEMF generators will be required to provide backup lift. Otherwise the field will be used to anchor the house in its fixed position."
"So you're going to need some kind of base," I said. "Near the pile."
"Well, we could do away with magnetic fields altogether by making Wetherall's house a propeller-driven airship. Of course, it would need a full-time pilot..."
"No pilots," said Wetherall firmly. "No stewardesses or servants or mechanics or people of any sort. Not on board, anyway. Everything is to be completely automated. This is the one place in the world where I can be by myself."
"I won't rule an airship out," Nguyen said, "but I agree that it's not a very elegant solution. I'm an architect, after all, not an aeronautical engineer. Besides, an airship would probably require an even more elaborate base station, including a hangar for shelter during extreme wind conditions. And there would of course be periodic equipment inspections and repair. No, I would prefer a Laputa-like solution; a helium balloon locked in place by a very tight electro-magnetic tether."
He leaned over the map. "Which brings us to our first major decision: where do we site the base generator? Ideally, we would want to build something permanent. The maximum range of a fixed VTEMF generator locked in phase with a smaller portable such as the one here on Laputa is about twenty-five hundred meters. It would be best if we could locate the base on a height, where it will be safe from shitdog depredations." He touched the A pile and then drew his finger out about forty centimeters. "So if we create a circle with its center at A and with a radius of twenty-five hundred meters..." A white circle appeared on the simulation. "...we see that we are tantalizingly close to several elevated sites. Here to the west we have this spur of the Pilot mountain range; to the south are the Leppy Hills. How close must you be to the jewels, Wetherall?"
"Close enough to touch."
"Sheer extravagance." Nguyen shook his head ruefully. "I would expect nothing less from you. That puts us down onto the flat, which is where we'll need your expertise, Liz. How far will the shitdogs range?"
"Impossible to predict," I said. "While they rarely go more than a couple of kilometers from the working pile, one of the Australian shitdogs made a documented run of over eight kilometers. Plus we don't know where they'll decide to start the next pile or how many they'll eventually build."
"Which means we may have to abandon the fixed base concept. If the shitdogs were to eat his base generator, Wetherall here would find himself taking an untethered balloon ride on the prevailing winds. In the unlikely event that he made it over the eastern Mountains, he almost certainly would come to grief in the Southern Rockies."
"What if we bury the base?" said Wetherall.
"Expensive, but worth considering -- although you still run the risk of having the shitdogs destroy your access. Liz, suppose a shitdog is in a hurry. How fast could it run?"
"Well, we haven't exactly been able to clock them in a race. But in short spurts, as fast as a man, maybe faster. Say thirty-two kilometers an hour."
"So a mobile base similar to my truck down there should be able to outpace a charging shitdog?"
"One shitdog is no problem. But if you were trying to escape a pack of them, there might be trouble."
"I didn't think they traveled in packs," said Wetherall.
"They did on the way here," I said.
* * * *
"Here is my proposal." Nguyen waved at the hologram and it winked out. "Wetherall, I think we should begin design of your lifthouse immediately, using Laputa as a model. That part of the project ought to go forward, regardless of the final base solution -- even if we decide to build you an airship. In the meantime, I'll be moving Laputa to Eastline to survey the site. Liz, I'd like you to come with me. We need to do some experiments." Nguyen pushed back from the table and walked across the room. "We'll have to make a more precise determination of the shitdogs' tolerance of incursions. What sort of activities and/or structures get their attention? What's the deepest they've dug underground? Exactly how fast do they move? What is the likelihood of cooperative behaviors?"
"I'll have to take a leave of absence." The idea would have been unthinkable a few hours earlier. Now I contemplated it with some enthusiasm. I guess I'd joined the team. "And the kind of research you're asking for is going to cost..."
"Don't worry," said Wetherall. "That'll be taken care of."
Nguyen opened a cabinet and brought out three crystal glasses and a winebell of Pommery & Greno. "We are agreed then?" He popped the cork, grinning. I wondered what he was so happy about. The design? The commission? The chance to associate himself with Wetherall?
"To our mysterious visitors," said Nguyen, raising his champagne.
"And their jewels." I touched my glass to his.
"To solitude." Wetherall drained his glass, set it back on the conference table, and glanced at his datacuff. "Excuse me, but I've got to be in Munich, Islamabad and Cornwall, Connecticut in about fifteen minutes."
* * * *
The pix on the back of the door of my room -- or rather, my suite -- at The Zones informed me that the fire escape was seven doors down the hall to my left. I asked it the nightly rate: eight hundred thirty dollars. I had once spent a week at Sebago Lake in Maine for eight hundred fifty dollars, but then the camp I'd rented hadn't come with a waterfall, a Steinway, or a bed the size of the District of Columbia. The room looked like a set for a gropie of _The Thief of Baghdad_.
When Wetherall had checked me in, he'd said he'd call later, that we'd have dinner. It was only after he'd left that I realized I didn't know what _later_ or _dinner_ meant to a billionaire. It seemed a safe assumption that we'd be going out somewhere, except that Wetherall clearly had an aversion to being seen in public. And I had no idea how long he'd need to honcho his avatars through their meetings. Would we be dining at eight? Ten? Midnight? Should I order room service in the meantime? Did I have time to go down to the casino, skim a couple of hundred off Wetherall's card and gamble? I kicked off my shoes, vaulted onto the bed and bounced.
* * * *
I freely admit that jumping on beds that don't belong to me is a childish habit that has persisted far too long into my adulthood, but it helps settle me down when I'm on the road. Besides, I liked it that this was something no one knew about me.
* * * *
Everything was happening so fast. I was probably going to get my picture in _Eye_ with Wetherall. Although that kind of publicity would doubtless ruin my reputation in the department, I enjoyed picturing Saintjohn's reaction. That's right, Dr. Matthewson, I skipped the Curriculum Committee meeting for _this_. And freshmen don't need chip implants -- they should be reading books. By _authors_.
Then there was the problem of carrying my course load with the fall semester already three weeks old. Meanwhile, I had just agreed to move to Eastline, Nevada with Nguyen O'Hara and his sly smile. Where was I going to stay? Eastline had no Sheraton.
It was a good bed for bouncing on.
* * * *
Wetherall's avatar called at eight. I could tell it was the avatar by its witless smile.
"Hi, Liz. Are you hungry yet?"
"I could eat." I casually motioned for the hairdresser to stand in front of the coffee table, blocking the avatar's view of the Peking ravioli I'd ordered from room service.