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

"I'm not here," said the avatar. "And I can't talk right now."
"But you are talking. Where are you?"
"Not far, a motel. I'll see you in a few days." The avatar turned away from me and gestured at someone I couldn't see. "No, no, not you. Her. I'll be there in a minute."
"Wetherall, are you with someone?"
"It's just business. Stay right where you are."
"What do you mean, stay where I am? Where would I go?"
"Very good, Cobble." The avatar's voice was full of false camaraderie. "You do that, all right? Good night now." And then it faded. Where its image had cowered, there was only a smooth silver glow in the gathering darkness.
I told myself I didn't care who Wetherall slept with. I only felt sorry for her. So what if he had come back to save me at the Rain Forest? He'd called me Cobble, like I was some junior assistant nobody. I pounded the van with the side of my hand; I think I got Billy Bar right in his pudgy little chin.
"_My_ friends call me Liz, asshole."
It was only on the way back to Laputa that it hit me: Why would the avatar have to be insulting, when it could spend as much time with me as necessary, while the real Wetherall was with his bimbo? Wasn't that the point of avatars?
Unless it had been the real Wetherall who answered my call. But that was even more inexplicable: why would he take my call if he were in a motel room with some other woman?
* * * *
I was back in control by the time I got back to Laputa. I had to be if I intended to pass safely under the quizzical arch of Nguyen O'Hara's eyebrow. And I had decided not to harbor any ill feelings -- or any feelings at all -- toward Wetherall.
"I'm back, Nguyen." I called, as I climbed the stairway to the living room.
"In here, Liz," he replied from the kitchen. He was sitting at the table with his back to me. I couldn't see at first what he was doing, but I could smell it.
"What's going on?" I asked.
He had a half dozen saucers arranged in front of him. "Ammonia-formula EasyWipe," he said, pointing. "Vicks Vaporub. Diced vitamins." Two of the saucers contained a scatter of burned remains. "Plastic and rubber," he said and then indicated a ruined something that might once have been an orange or maybe an apple if it hadn't been covered with a greenish, tennis-ball fur. "I retrieved this lovely from the bottom of the composter." There was a odd slackness at the corners of his mouth, a brightness to his eyes.
"Nguyen, we've got more stink than we can handle already."
"A very thoughtful man." Nguyen lowered his face dangerously close to the Vaporub saucer and breathed deeply. "A saint, actually."
"Who?"
"Our good friend Wetherall." Nguyen took a little brown bottle from his shirt and shook it. A handful of pills rattled inside. "Sent us a nosegay." He gave me a dreamy, very un-Nguyen-like leer.
I managed not to tell him just how Saint Wetherall was spending his time while O'Hara and I camped out in Laputa.
* * * *
The pills Nguyen had dubbed nosegays were prototypes of an anti-stink drug that Wetherall had commissioned. Since there wasn't any cost-effective way to purify the air of shitdog stench, the olfactory psychophysiologists at Jolly Freeze R&D had instead attacked the brain receptors involved in processing smells. The pills transformed human perception of the big stink. The smell was just as strong as ever, but nosegay users experienced it as sweet and appetizing.
Of course, there were psychotropic side effects: the flood of smell-stimuli had a mild hallucinogenic effect. Certainly Nguyen was acting odd. It was several hours before I was able to talk him out of smearing himself with his own ... but never mind. Although Wetherall's avatar assured us that a simple dosage adjustment was all that was necessary, I was wary.
Nguyen was not; he couldn't wait for the new improved batch. It wasn't until I saw that he was able to control his stink tropisms that I was finally convinced to try the drug.
I was impressed. Nosegays transformed the fetid air of the press encampment. And the intoxication induced by the lower dose was mild and actually quite pleasant. It made me feel at once silly and happy -- like when I jumped on a bed.
I missed jumping on the bed. It just wasn't something you did in a lifthouse.
* * * *
Not only did Wetherall's money make unusual things happen, it made them happen fast. Just last week I'd been worrying about my course load. Now I was writing the handbook for the entirely new art of shitdog management. Meanwhile, though I hardly had time to stop and marvel at it, plasticians were already assembling Wetherall's house. While his avatars oversaw the project, the man himself stayed away. I hadn't seen the real Wetherall since he left my hotel room at the Zones. I imagined him holed up in some Ramada Inn with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Maybe I'm a naive academic, but I was surprised at the ferocity of people's interest in what we were doing at Eastline. Sure, Wetherall's business, O'Hara's Laputa and the mystery of the shitdogs were each -- to varying degrees -- newsworthy in and of themselves, but the publicity surrounding the conjunction of all three was exponential. We always made the news; often as not we were the lead story. And not just in Vegas or LA, but in Berlin and Djakarta!
_Profit Week_ reported that shitdog castings would provide heretofore unimagined materials engineering applications, and that Wetherall would soon roll out a line of casting-based superadhesives.
_Hemisphere Confidential Report_ ran a story, complete with faked blueprints, which proved that Wetherall was building the lifthouse as a kind of degenerate love nest, where smelly and unspeakable sexual acts were to take place.
No, said _Channel Lore_, the lifthouse was designed to be the most secure site on the planet; mercenary shitdogs would act as Wetherall's personal bodyguards against kidnappers and industrial saboteurs.
On _NewsMelt_, Blaine Thorp claimed he'd helped decipher the shitdog's language and explained that Wetherall was moving into the lifthouse to conduct secret negotiations for the establishment of a space-based utopia.
_Eye_ offered this exclusive: Wetherall had devised a way to remove the jewels from the piles intact and had already contracted with Cartier's to turn them into the world's biggest necklace. Some insiders speculated he'd offer it as an engagement present to Dawn Zoftiggle. But "inside" insiders revealed that Wetherall had fallen head over heels in love with a woman he'd met while on location near the Eastline site. This mystery woman, it was said by those who really knew, would someday wear the alien jewels.
I credited none of this, of course, except the part about the mystery woman, whom I took to be the bimbo at the motel. But the volume and audacity of the false reports boded ill for his hopes of privacy, once the lifthouse was completed. Meanwhile, Wetherall's avatars gave cheery and innocuous interviews to whomever would listen. Only no one seemed to believe anything they said. Instead, commentators read sinister meaning into their PR platitudes.
Whenever he wasn't working on the project, Nguyen would personally lead reporters through Laputa. He was very disciplined in his approach: he would discuss himself, the lifthouse, the remoteness of the site, the problems of building around the shitdogs and then more about himself. He deflected questions he didn't want to answer with self-deprecating humor, and was gentlemanly about keeping me out of the spotlight, making sure I knew when tours were scheduled so I could retreat to my room. When questions about the shitdogs came up, he transformed me into an anonymous committee. It was always "My experts tell me that..." or "I've consulted my advisors on this..."
* * * *
I was grateful for Nguyen's discretion, because Wetherall had yet to deliver my avatar.
Murk Janglish tried to explain it during one of his visits to Laputa. "Never seen anything like it, actually," he said. "At first I thought it was your fault. Maybe you sabotaged the inventory or something, but the techs say no. There must have been some noise in the signal when your personality was scanned."
I was secretly gratified. I liked it that they were having troubles cramming me into their damned program.
"I'll be patient," I said. "But I'm not going public. Nguyen will just have to keep shielding me."
"Shielding you?" said Janglish icily. "More like throwing himself at every camera he sees."
Nguyen smiled.
"You're getting so much publicity out of this, O'Hara, you ought to be paying _us_."
Nguyen laughed out loud. "Now what would my good friend Wetherall do with more money?" he said, refilling Janglish's champagne glass. "He has got far too much as it is."
* * * *
Two days later Nguyen and I stood out on the salt flat, our noses filled with the fragrance of shitdogs digesting. It would have been delightful except for the late afternoon sun beating on us. We were waiting for the driver of the prototype mobile base that the Jolly Freeze engineers had thrown together. I had ordered a test run to see how the dogs would react. At the moment they lay pulsing, looking as oblivious and lazy as ever.
They weren't, of course. Things were changing.