"David Marusek - Getting to Know You" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marusek David)

pain, but it was no monster. Still, she’d be happy to get rid of it, and the
Diplomat belt was an at-tractive consolation prize. If she grafted Hounder
into it, she’d be ahead of the technology curve for once. “I’m going to want
all the details when I get back, but for now, yeah, sure, you got a deal.”

After Zoranna ended the call, Bug said, “Name the members of your
immediate family and state their rela-tionship to you.”

The car began to decelerate, and Zoranna instinctively checked the
buckle of her harness. “My family is de-ceased, except for Nancy.”

With a hard bump, the car entered the ejection tube, found its wheels,
and braked. Lights flashed through the windows, and she saw signs
stenciled on the tube wall, “APRT 24, Stanchion 4 Depot.”

“What is Nancy’s favorite color?”

“That’s it. That’s enough. No more questions, Bug. You heard Ted;
you’re off the case. Until I ship you back, let’s just pretend you’re a plain
old, dumb belt valet. No more questions. Got it?”

“Affirmative.”

Pneumatic seals hissed as air pressure equalized, the car came to a
halt, and the doors slid open. Zoranna released the harness and retrieved
her luggage from the cargo net. She paused a moment to see if there’d be
any more ques-tions and then climbed out of the car to join throngs of
commuters on the platform. She craned her neck and looked straight up the
tower’s chimney, the five hundred-story atrium galleria where floor upon
floor of crowded shops, restaurants, theaters, parks, and gardens receded
skyward into brilliant haze. Zoranna was ashamed to ad-mit that she didn’t
know what her sister’s favorite color was, or for that matter, her favorite
anything. Except that Nancy loved a grand view. And the grandest thing
about an APRT was its view. The evening sun, multiplied by giant mirrors
on the roof, slid up the sides of the core in an inverted sunset. The
ascending dusk triggered whole floors of slumbering biolume railings and
walls to lumi-nesce. Streams of pedestrians crossed the dizzying space on
suspended pedways. The air pulsed with the din of an indoor metropolis.

When Nancy first moved here, she was an elementary school teacher
who specialized in learning disorders. De-spite the surcharge, she leased a
suite of rooms so near the top of the tower it was impossible to see her
floor from depot level. But with the Procreation Ban of 2033, teachers
became redundant, and Nancy was forced to move to a lower, less
expensive floor. Then, when free-agency clone technology was licensed,
she lost altitude tens of floors at a time. “My last visit,” Zoranna said to Bug,
“Nancy had an efficiency on the 103rd floor. Check the tower directory.”

“Nancy resides on S40.”