"Chris Moriarty - Spin Control" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moriarty Chris)

Also by Chris Moriarty

SPIN STATE




THE GOLEM



Monsters…are a state of mind.

—E. O. WILSON (1995)



S HE WAS PROBABLY NO MORE than thirty.

It was hard to tell with humans. They all looked old to Arkady, and they aged fast out here in the
Trusteeships where people lost months and years just getting from one planet to the next.

This human looked like she’d lived harder than most. Her skin was ravaged by decades of unfiltered
sunlight, her face lined by wind and worry, her features gaunt with the gravity of some heavy planet. Still,
Arkady didn’t think she could be more than a few subjective years beyond his twenty-seven.

“Act like you’re picking me up,” she said in a low husky voice that would have been sensual had it not
been ratcheted tight by fear. She spoke UN-standard Spanish, but her flat vowels and guttural
consonants betrayed her native tongue as Hebrew.

She flagged down the barkeep and ordered two of something Arkady had never heard of. When she
gripped his arm to draw him closer, he saw that her cuticles were rough and ragged and she’d bitten her
nails to the quick.

He bent over her, smelling the acrid fungal smell of the planet-born, and recited the words Korchow had
taught him back on Gilead. She fed him back the answers he’d been told to wait for. She was pulling
them off hard memory; her pupils dilated, blossoming across the pale iris, every time she accessed her
virally embedded RAM. He tried not to stare and failed.

This is your first monster, he told himself. Get used to them.

He studied the woman’s face, wondering if she was what other members of her species would call
normal. It seemed unlikely. To Arkady’s crèche-born eyes her features looked as mismatched as if
they’d been culled from a dozen disparate genelines. The predatory nose jutted over an incongruously
delicate jawline. The forehead was high and intelligent…but too flat and scowling to get past any
competent genetic designer. And even under the dim flicker of the strobe lights it was obvious that her
eyes were mismatched. The right eye fixed Arkady with a steel blue stare, while the left one wandered
across the open room behind him so that he had to fight the urge to turn around and see who she was
really talking to.