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

“OK, but if the woman had stuck with her first offer, what oh! I see. You’d have gone to
another stall.”
Suze grinned, passing back the joint. “Make an economist of you yet.”
“Hah! Hard to believe, now, that the whole world was once run like this.”
Suze nodded soberly. “This, and various combinations of this and pushing people around.
Weird.”
We got up to leave, and were recalled by an indignant yell from the food-stall minder.
“Sorree!” Suze said to him, blushing as she passed him a silver coin. “Keep the change.”
It took her even longer to explain to me about that: the custom of a price that wasn’t a price, on
top of the price; a sum that was never asked for, but whose omission was always resented. We
wandered on towards the stalls of books and machines. The smoke, and the coffee and food, had
shifted my brain chemistry in the way I’d hoped. They were helping me to adjust to what was
going on around me, but I still let Suze do the talking.
She browsed the bookstalls and _machine. shops and nanotech tanks, making the occasional
small purchase and apparently idle inquiries after Malley. Sometimes she used his full name,
sometimes she just wondered aloud if anyone had heard of “the scientist” or “the old doc”. Most of
the sellers seemed to know her by sight, and gave her less of a hard bargain than some other Union
tourists were getting. At the last stall she picked up and leafed through an obsolete textbook of
physics which she’d dug up from one of the plastic boxes at the foot of the stall.
“I wish I knew someone who could explain this to me,” she said, casually handing the book to
the seller. He was plump, even for a non-co, pink-skinned, and wrapped in a curious multicoloured
patchwork coat that made him look like some tubby wizard. He glanced at the book; his eyes
narrowed and his grip suddenly tightened. He pulled the book back.
“Sorry, miss,” he said. “Not for sale.”
Suze gave him her best innocent-tourist look.
“Oh? That’s a shame. Why not?”
“I’ve been asked to save anything by this bloke Wheeler for the professor.”
“Sure,” said Suze. “Professor Malley, isn’t it?” She seemed to forget the matter, leaning
forward and pouncing on a copy of the rare Home Workshop Nanotech (Loompanics, 2052). “Hey,
look at this!” She passed it to me and looked again at the stall-holder, eyebrows raised.
“Yeah, Malley,” he said. “He comes by now and again. Ain’t seen him for a few weeks,
though.”
“He’s still running a school down Ealing way, ain’t he?”
“That’s right,” said the stall-holder. His accent blended in with the local speech, but his diction
was clearer, at least to me. Suze glanced at the price pencilled on the book’s inside cover, and
passed the man a gold coin, without her customary haggling. He seemed to take this as a payment
for a little more than the book (I was beginning to grasp how these people’s minds worked, I
thought smugly) and went on: “Funny you should be asking after him.” He scratched the stubble on
his upper chin. “Couple of your lot -“ he coughed “uh, Union members were through the other day,
looking for him.”
I felt a jolt of surprise.
“Yes, he’s quite famous really,” Suze responded lightly. “I’m sure lots of people want to talk to
him. I wonder if they’re anyone I know?”
He shrugged. “Hard to say, you people all what I mean is, they were two blokes, right, about
your age real age and about her height.” He indicated me. “Tall, dark, but not uh, more sort of
Indian-looking than you ladies, if you know what I mean.”
“Did you notice,” I asked carefully, “anything unusual in the way they moved?”
His face brightened. “Yeah! That’s it! Something about them bothered me. Couldn’t put me
finger on it. But one of them had a funny way of hanging on to the edge of the table, like what
you’re doing now -“ I let go and straightened up, self-consciously “and they both had a way of