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

emergence from the wormhole, I had some importance in Wilde’s life ... but I didn’t want him
introducing me as such, and thus letting everyone present know where I was from.
Meg stepped over and caught my hands.
“It’s good to see you again, Ellen.”
 “Yeah, you too,” I said, and meant it. Her personality might be synthetic, but its appeal was
genuine. I’d sometimes wondered what she saw in Wilde, whose fabled charm had never worked
on me. “What brings you here?” Meg asked.
“You don’t make yourselves easy to find,” I said lightly. “So I thought I’d take the
opportunity.”
Meg smiled. “You’re a busy woman, Ellen. You want something.”
“Oh, you know,” I said. “Perhaps we can talk about it later?”
She was looking up at me, a small frown on her smooth brow.
“Of course,” she said. “Things should quiet down, soon.”
I laughed. “You mean, like when Wilde’s spoken to everybody?”
“Something like that.” She drew me to a nearby seat, just outside the huddle, and I sat down
with her. “This is all a bit exhausting,” she said absently. She stroked one bare foot with the other,
and stubbed out her cigarette. The monkey hopped from my shoulder and clutched the edge of the
ashtray, its big eyes entreating me. I shook my head at it. It bared its teeth, then turned away from
me and let Meg play with it.
Wilde’s voice, carrying: “this whole thing: turning his sayings into a scripture, and him into a
martyred prophet it’s almost the only irrationality you people have left! I think he would have
laughed!” And with that Wilde’s laugh boomed, and those around him joined in, hesitantly. The
conversation broke up over the next few minutes, and Wilde ambled over and sat down beside me.
The three of us were perched as if on a log in an eddied swirl. Around us people partied on; now
and again someone would drift over, see no response signalled, and turn away. Some left, but most
hung around, tactfully out of earshot.
We exchanged greetings and then Wilde leaned away from me and sat shoulder-to-shoulder with
Meg.
“Well, Ellen,” he said. “You got us where you want us.” He lit a cigarette and accepted a shot of
vodka. He looked down at his glass. “This has already had several other drinks in it,” he observed.
“Nice thing about vodka, of course, is it doesn’t matter. Any taste is an improvement. I’m drunk
already. So if there’s anything you forgot to ask us, in the debriefing -“
“Interrogation.” I always hated the old statist euphemisms.
“go right ahead. Now’s your chance.” He swayed farther back and looked at me with a defiant
grin.
“You know what I want, Wilde,” I said heavily. I was a bit drunk myself, and more than a little
tired. Gravity gets you down (and space sucks, but that’s life). “Don’t ask me to spell it out.”
He leaned forward. I could smell the smoke and spirits on his breath.
“Oh, I know better than that,” he said. “The same old question. Well, it’s the same old answer:
no. There is no way, no fucking way I’m going to give you people what you are so carefully not
asking for.”
“Why not?”
Always the same question, which always got the same answer: “I won’t let you lot get your
hands on the place.”
I felt my fists clench at my sides, and slowly relaxed them.
“We don’t want the wretched place!”
“Hah!” said Wilde, with open disbelief. “Whatever. It won’t be me who gives you the means to
take it.”
It would have to be somebody else who did, then, I thought. I kept my voice steady, and quiet.
“Not even to fight the Outwarders?”