"Ken Macleod - Fall Revolution 3 - The Cassini Division" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

to suspect, not a recreation here but a necessity.
I stopped in front of a stall on which dried leaves of tobacco and hemp were laid out in labelled
bundles, neatly sorted into opentopped boxes. The woman behind the stall was prettily dressed in
an embroidered cotton blouse and a printed cotton long skirt, gathered at the waist with a
drawstring. It was hard to work out her age like many of the adult non-cos, she seemed to combine
the detached watchfulness of age with the innocent selfishness of youth, and, on top of that, her
cosmetics made a baffling mask: her cheeks reddened, the rest of her face whitened, eyes darkened
and lips flushed, as if she’d been awake all night and was now in a state of sexual arousal. But she
had an attractive smile.
“Suze,” I said, nudging, “could we ?”
Suze grinned and nodded, then, when I reached into the pocket of my rucksack, frowned and
shook her head.
“I’ll do it,” she murmured.
She looked up at the woman behind the table, and fingered a leaf labelled “Kent Ganja”.
“How much you got on this?”
“Best stuff, lady,” the woman said. “Two grams gold, five grams silver an ounce.”
(That’s what I later worked out she said. At the time her strange singsong went into my ears as:
“Besstuff laidy, two gramzgold five gramzsilveranahnce.”) Suze recoiled. “Fackinell!” she said.
“Thassexpensiv init?” (I still haven’t figured that one; I’ll leave it as it sounded.) “Nah,” said the
woman. “From cross the riveh, thatiz. Transport’s fackin criminal. You won’t get cheaper
anywhere.”
She waved around at the rest of the market. “Try “t an” see f y”selves. you’ll be back.”
 “Not likely,” said Suze, taking me by the elbow and firmly steering me away. We’d gone only a
few steps when the woman called out: “Awright, I’ll give you a special, just to try it aht. Frow in
paypas, too.”
Back we went and the bargain, after a few more verbal exchanges, was concluded. To my
surprise both the woman and Suze were smiling at each other, both apparently satisfied with an
outcome which they had each insisted would, if repeated too often, reduce one or the other to
complete wretchedness.
We sat down at a table a few yards away and ordered coffee and bread rolls stuffed with cooked
meat which had almost certainly not been grown from blue-greens. I’m not sentimental about
beasts, but I tried not to think about it too much marine molluscs are one thing, vertebrates are
something else. When we’d finished eating Suze built a small joint of tobacco and hemp, lit it and
passed it to me after a few appreciative puffs. “Good stuff,” she said.
I tested and confirmed this. “Yes,” I said. “Just like the woman said it was. But won’t she ...
dislike you for the way you made her accept such a small amount of silver for it?”
Suze guffawed. “She got a very good price an acceptable Mount of silver for it. She’s happy
with the silver, and we’re happy with the hemp. Oh, thanks.”
I looked at her as she drew on it again. “So you were both lying?”
“No, of course not,” Suze chuckled. “It’s a convention. Like bluffing in a strategy game.”
“But why did you bother to go through it? Why didn’t you just give her what she asked in the
first place? I mean ...” I shrugged, having enough nous to understand that saying out loud how
much metal we had on us might not be a good idea.
“Ah,” said Suze. “That’s an interesting point. In theory, OK, all the Union tourists here could
bring as much, uh, negotiables as they could carry, and buy anything they wanted. All that would
happen is that the amount the locals expected for their goods would go up, and everybody would be
worse off all round. That’s one of the things that get explained to first-timers. It used to be called
inflation when there were states.” She frowned. “Sort of, except they used pretend money -“
I cut her off hastily, not wanting to get my head around yet another complication (pretend
money? Say what?).