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

Somewhere in one of the groups around it, talking above the faint white noise of the falling air,
would be the couple whose presence was the occasion for the party the people I’d come to speak to,
if only for a moment. There was no point in pushing through the crowd like anyone here who
really wanted to, I’d reach them eventually by always making sure I was headed in their direction.
I made my way to a drinks table, put down my bottle and picked up a glass of Mare Imbrium
white. The first sip let me know that it was, aptly enough, very dry. My slight grimace met a
knowing smile. It came from the man in blue, who’d somehow managed to appear in front of me.
“Aren’t you used to it?”
So he knew, or had guessed, whence I came. I made a show of inspecting him, over a second
sip. He was, unlike me, genuinely young. Not bad-looking, in the Angloslav way, with dirty-
blonde tousled hair and pink, shaved face; broad cheekbones, blue eyes. Almost as tall as me taller,
if I took my shoes off. His curious device hung on a strap around his neck.
“Comet vodka’s more to my taste,” I said. I handed the glass into the monkey-thing’s small
black paws and stuck out my hand. “Ellen May Ngwethu. Pleased to meet you, neighbour.”
“Stephan Vrij,” he said, shaking hands. “Likewise.” He watched as the drink was returned.
“Smart monkey,” he said.
“That’s right,” I replied, unhelpfully. Smart spacesuit, was the truth of it, but people down here
tended to get edgy around that sort of stuff.
 “Well,” he went on, “I’m on the block committee, and tonight I’m supposed to welcome the
uninvited and the unexpected.”
“Ah, thanks. And to flash bright lights at them?”
“It’s a camera,” he said, hefting it. “I made it myself.”
It was the first time I’d seen a camera visible to the naked eye.
My interest in this wasn’t entirely feigned in order to divert any questions about myself, but after
a few minutes of his explaining about celluloid film and focal lengths he seemed unsurprised that
my glazed-over gaze was wandering. He smiled and said: “Well, enjoy yourself, Ellen. I see some
other new arrivals.”
“See you around.” I watched him thread his way back towards the doors. So my picture would
turn up in the building’s newspaper, and a hundred thousand people would see it. Fame. But not
such as to worry about. This was the middle of the Atlantic, and the middle of nowhere.
The Casa Azores was (is? unlikely I’ll stick to the past tense, though the pangs are sharp) on
Graciosa, a small island in an archipelago in the North Atlantic, which is (probably, even now) an
ocean on Earth. It was so far from anywhere that, even from its kilometre-high observation deck,
you couldn’t observe its neighbouring islands. The sea and sky views might be impressive, but
right now all the huge windows showed was reflected light from within. The lift from which I’d
made my entrance was at the edge, and I had to get to the central area within the next few hours,
sometime after the crowd had thinned but before everyone was too exhausted to think.
I drained the glass, picked up a bottle of good Sungrazer Stolichnya, gave the monkey a clutch
of stemmed goblets to hold in its little fingers, and set out to work the party.
“Nanotech’s all right in itself,” a small and very intense artist was explaining. “I mean, you can
see atoms, right? Heck, with the bucky waldoes you can feel them, move them about and stick
them together. It’s mechanical linkages all the way up to your fingers. And to your screen, for that
matter. But all that electronic quantum stuff is, like, spooky ...”
She had other listeners. I moved on.
“You’re from space? Oh, great. I work with the people in the orbitals. We do zaps. Say
you’ve got a replicator outbreak somewhere, natural or nano, like it makes a difference ... anyway,
before the zap we all sorta wander around the evac zone, one, to check there’s nobody there and,
two, just to soak up and record anything that might get lost. You don’t get much time, you’re in an
isolation suit that has to be flashed off you before you come out, for obvious reasons takes most of
your body hair with it, too but even so, you can see and feel and hear a lot, and for hours or days,