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

“Why did you come here?” the woman asked when she was satisfied he was who he said he was.

“You know why.”

“I mean the real reason.”

You have to ask for money, Korchow had told him during the interminable briefing sessions. He could
see Korchow’s face in his mind’s eye: a spy’s face, a diplomat’s face, a manifesto in flesh and blood of
everything KnowlesSyndicate was supposed to stand for. You have no idea what money means to
humans, Arkady. It’s how they reward each other, how they control each other. If you don’t ask
for it, you won’t feel real to them.

“I came for the money,” he told Osnat, trying not to sound like an explorer trading beads with the natives.

“And you trust us to give it to you?”

“You know who I trust.” Still following Korchow’s script. “You know who I need to see.”

“At least you had the wits not to say his name.” She glanced at the shadowy maze of ventilation ducts
and spinstream conduits overhead to indicate that they were under surveillance.

“Here?” Arkady asked incredulously.

“Everywhere. The AIs can tap any spin, anytime, anywhere. You’re in UN space now. Get used to it.”

Arkady glanced at the sullen and exhausted drinkers around him and wondered what they could possibly
be doing that was worth the attention of the UN’s semisentients. These weren’t humans as he’d been
raised to believe in them. Where were the fat cat profiteers and the spiritually bankrupt individualists of
his sociobiology textbooks? Where were the gene traders? Where were the slave drivers and the brutally
oppressed genetic constructs? All he saw here were algae skimmers and coltran miners. Posthumans
whose genetic heritage was too haphazard for anyone to be able to guess whether they were human or
construct or some unknown quasi-species between the two. People who scratched out a living from
stones and mud and carried the dirt of planets under their fingernails. Throwaway people.

Arkasha would probably have said they were beautiful. He would have talked passionately about
pre-Evacuation literature, about the slow sure currents of evolution, and the vast chaotic genetic river that
was posthumanity. But all Arkady could see here was poverty, disease, and danger.

The bartender slapped their drinks down hard enough to send sour-smelling liquid cascading onto the
countertop. The woman picked up hers and gulped thirstily. Arkady just stared at his. He could smell it
from here, and it smelled bad. Like yeast and old skin and overloaded air filters: all the smells he was
beginning to recognize as the smells of humans.

“So.” The woman used the word as if it were an entire sentence.

“Who really sent you?”

“I’m here on my own account. I thought you understood that.”

“We understood that was what you wanted us to understand.” She had a habit of hanging on a word that