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

"I've no doubt you can, Dr. Cobble," Wetherall said. "But you're working for me now, and I stand by my employees. Dr. Thorp," he said, "if you have any complaints about your treatment, take them up with Mr. Janglish here." Wetherall held out his arm, I took it, and pushing past the photographer, we went straight to the elevator and up to my suite.
Once inside, Wetherall seemed to get an attack of shyness. He wrestled the petulant wig from his head and eyed the door nervously.
"You can wait here while things cool off downstairs," I said.
"That's not the way the paparazzi work. The longer I wait the more of them will gather." He handed the wig to me. "Would you take care of this?"
He slipped out of the room before I could ask him what to feed it.
So I plopped onto a chair the size of a subcompact car, kicked a Donya Durand shoe at the mirror and then stared into it, trying to find the simple, boring Professor Liz Cobble who had gotten out of bed that morning. At least my hair didn't crawl all over my scalp.
* * * *
Sometimes I blamed my aunts for turning me into that boring Professor Liz Cobble. Aunt Lindsay was Professor of Vertebrate Semiology at the University of Wisconsin, and Aunt Kym ran the only sensory deprivation spa in Madison. Growing up in their purple and pink Victorian house had been much more of an adventure than I'd wanted after my parents died. Although I knew I could never _be_ normal again, I could at least _seem_ normal. But the outside world was certain that I was living with a pair of lunatics.
The fact that Aunt Lindsay and Aunt Kym loved me only made things harder. For their part, they were open minded when I insisted on wearing clothes to school and dating outside of my gender, although I could tell they thought I was being oppressed by the patriarchy and commodified by the Bank of America. I became a little reclusive, and a little prickly about challenges to my own way of doing things. I spent a lot of time as a child watching myself for signs that I would end up like them, and in reaction I became Ms. Dutiful Grind.
But I still remember the smell of the scented electrolyte that always clung to Aunt Kym like the oddest of perfumes, _eau d'inconscience collective_. And Aunt Lindsay teaching me to read as I sat on her lap and she took me through her charts of the seven stages of courtship in the lesser cetaceans.
I suppose exobiology wasn't a surprising career choice for somebody with a seeker of primal truths in place of one parent and a student of the sign language of animals in place of the other. But I'd intended to be entirely more sober about the way I lived than my aunts.
Except that here I was, rattling around in a new jar of mixed nuts. Fanatic Blaine Thorp and pathetic Ramsdel Wetherall, soft Nguyen O'Hara and hard Murk Janglish. And me.
I had only myself to blame.
* * * *
One day after my dinner with Wetherall, Nguyen O'Hara and I started for Eastline aboard Laputa, which was being towed by the base truck on its electromagnetic tether. The guestrooms aboard the lifthouse were lavishly outfitted, if not exactly up to Zones standards. Wetherall had arranged to have my office chair and desk moved overnight so I would feel comfortable in my work environment. I chatted briefly with one of his jolly avatars, who said he'd gone ahead to coordinate the arrival of equipment and supplies.
We cleared the Wasatch Range by midday, and the wastes unfolded before us. The dwarfing effect of the expanse always catches me by surprise, no matter how many times I visit the desert. The absolute white and flat of the evaporated salt plains takes ordinary vastness to the level of the conceptual: Earth's tabula rasa. The human mind flinches from the blank page. All we can do is build scrawny highways through to the next inhabitable place, out from under the hammer of weather, off the edge of the table of the possible. Whatever their reasons, the shitdogs had chosen the loneliest place on earth.
Ordinarily the loneliest. For, by the time we arrived at the rendezvous point, we weren't alone. The combination of the Wetherall angle, the Laputa photo op, and the public confrontation with Thorp had rekindled interest in the Eastline site. Two kilometers west of the shimmering piles and dark entrenchments of shitdog territory, a sprawl of vans and campers and bubbles had sprung up; it was almost the size of the army of reporters that covered Holy Joe Jolson on his pilgrimage to Bayonne. Wetherall's people had marked off the boundary of his property, and the media had nested just outside it, on public land.
I had no doubt one of Wetherall's avatars was negotiating for its purchase even as we watched.
As we approached the encampment, the base truck shortened our tether, until we hovered only fifteen meters above the salt flat. I wondered what Nguyen was doing. I wasn't in suspense for long; the truck parked between the Time/Pepsi compound and the _NewsMelt_ van. Laputa was to be the star attraction of the media circus. The truck began to reel us in for boarding.
* * * *
I found Nguyen in his office. "You're docking right in the middle of the feeding frenzy?"
"Indeed," said Nguyen. "Someone has to be the story -- why not us? It was Wetherall's idea, actually. He asked that we stay here to divert attention. He wants to discourage fly-overs at the worksite or the piles. Wise, I think."
"But I'm allergic to cameras," I said. "My tongue swells up and my IQ drops." Nguyen didn't hear me. He peered intently down at the crowd that was gathering around his truck. I thought he might be taking a head count. "You like this, don't you? The publicity?"
"Whether I like it or not is beside the point. It's part of the business. I'm an architect, Liz. Do you have any idea how many of us are left?"
I shook my head.
"Any computer can design a building these days. All I have to sell is style. If people don't know who I am, then how will they know that I have it? If you're not comfortable with reporters, let your avatar handle them. That's what Wetherall does. He's famous for his accessibility, which is nice trick considering he's a recluse."
There were at least a hundred people beneath us now. Most were pointing cameras at the stairway that was extending toward the lifthouse from the rear of the truck.
"But if we're in the middle of everything, how is Wetherall going to get on board? They'll spot him in a minute."
He glanced up at me, surprised, then nodded as if he had just discovered an interesting secret. "But Wetherall isn't staying here, Liz. That was never the plan." He showed me the sly O'Hara smile. "Sorry to disappoint, but it's just the two of us."
No sooner had he said this than his screen blinked: a call. I expected Wetherall, or a Wetherall avatar, but it was Murk Janglish.
"We need to discuss your contract, O'Hara," began Janglish, without saying hello. "You've lined out all the work-for-hire language. That won't do."
"My name is Nguyen. Say _Ngu-yen_."
"Say it? Why?
"You and Wetherall are like good-cop, bad-cop." Nguyen smiled. "He entices, and you come along afterwards to punish."
Murk Janglish seemed taken aback. "I'm sending you a clean copy," he said. "You need to sign it. No changes."
"All right, Murk." Nguyen's expression was saintly. "But only if you deliver it in person."
"Why the hell would I do that?"
"Why the hell would I do that, _Nguyen_," said Nguyen O'Hara.
Janglish's screen went dark.
"I don't know whether to describe that as a bad personality or no personality," I said.
"Oh, it's a personality," said O'Hara.
* * * *
The first thing I noticed as I came down the stairway was the big stink. The piles were two kilometers away and the air was dead calm and still there it was, like a bituminous skunk in the next door neighbor's yard. Unpleasant, but not yet painful.
I had put on a Laputa uniform so that I could pass as one of the staff. I'd told Nguyen that I wanted to stretch my legs and he had told me that I was free to go as I pleased. That wasn't true exactly. Once the reporters figured out who I was, I'd be trapped in the lifthouse, unless I was willing to give interviews. Which I was definitely not. I was going to let my avatar do all the talking, just as soon as Wetherall delivered it.
I wandered through the colony, listening to the journalists grouse. They complained about the big stink, of course, and the heat and the boredom and the bad food and the power rationing. Fox had ordered another Solelectric array from Salt Lake City, but it wouldn't be operational until next Monday. Several locals from Wendover were trucking in fresh water, which they were happy to sell to the fourth estate at champagne prices.
I discovered one vehicle I knew all too well: Blaine Thorp's "Dog Squad" car. I ducked behind an old school bus before anyone saw me and then sighted back on Laputa to get my bearings, so I could be sure never to come this way again. I wasn't interested in public debates with the lunatic.
It was about ten minutes later that I noticed the Billy Bar wrapper stuck to the flap of a trashcan. I lifted the lid; there were more inside. I knocked on doors nearby until a woman from _Izvestia_ directed me to the Jolly Freeze van parked at the easternmost edge of the colony. The sides were dark; the pix of Judy Jolly Freeze sat in a chair, hands folded neatly in her lap, her eyes closed.
"Wetherall?" I walked around the van twice, hunting for some sign of life, then knocked at the rear door. "Wetherall!"
"Liz?" Judy opened one eye. "Ssssh!" She pointed. "Over here." I went around to the side of the van that faced the empty salt vastness.
At first I couldn't see Wetherall's avatar, because it was only half a meter tall and hiding behind Billy Bar's legs. "I want to talk, Wetherall," I said. "I just saw Thorp's car. Let me in."