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

gave it a weight at odds with its apparent significance and left Arkady wondering if anything in her world
meant what it seemed to mean. “It wouldn’t be the first time a professional came across the lines posing
as an amateur.”

Arkady played with his drink, buying time. Don’t explain, don’t apologize, Korchow had told him.
Right before he’d told him what would happen to Arkasha if he failed.

“I’m a myrmecologist,” he told her.

“Whatever the fuck that is.”

“I study ants. For terraforming.”

“Bullshit. Terraforming’s dangerous. And you’re an A Series. You reek of it. No one who counts ever
gets handed that raw of a deal.”

“It was my Part,” he said reflexively before he could remember the word meant nothing to humans.

“You mean you volunteered?”

“I’m sorry.” Arkady’s confusion was genuine. “What is volunteered?”

Her right eye narrowed, though the left one remained serenely focused on the middle distance. An old
scar nicked the eyebrow above the lazy eye, and for the first time it occurred to Arkady that it might not
be a birth defect at all, but the product of a home-brewed wetware installation gone wrong. What if it
wasn’t internal RAM she was accessing but the spooky-action-at-a-distance virtual world of
streamspace? What was she seeing there? And who was paying her uplink fees?

A movement caught Arkady’s eye, and he turned to find a lone drinker staring at him from the far end of
the grease-smeared bartop. He watched the man take in his unlined stationer’s skin, his too-symmetrical
features, the gleam of perfect health that bespoke generations of sociogenetic engineering. They locked
eyes, and Arkady noticed what he should have noticed before: the dusty green flash of an Interfaither’s
skullcap.

You were supposed to be able to tell which religion Interfaithers hailed from by the signs they wore. A
Star of David for Jews; two signs Arkady couldn’t remember for Sunnis and Shi’ites; a multitude of
cryptic symbols for the various schismatic Christian sects. He gave the Interfaither another covert glance,
but the only sign he could see on him was a silver pendant whose two curving lines intersected to form
the abstracted shape of a fish.

The Interfaithers scared Arkady more than any other danger in UN space. It had been Interfaithers who
killed an entire contract group right here on Maris Station and mutilated their bodies so badly that all their
home Syndicates ever got back were diplomatic apologies. The rest of the UN had made peace with the
Syndicates—if you could call this simmering cold war a peace—but the Interfaithers hadn’t. And when
anyone asked them why, they used words like Abomination and Jihad and Crusade—words that
weren’t supposed to exist anymore in any civilized language.

Arkady glanced at the bar-back mirror, trying to reassure himself that he fit in well enough to pass safely.
What he saw didn’t reassure him at all. Korchow’s team had broken his nose and one cheekbone, a
precaution that had seemed barbaric back on Gilead. But it took decades at the bottom of a gravity well