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

to get the lined and haggard look of the planet-born. And it would have taken a lifetime—someone else’s
lifetime—to mold Arkady’s frank and open crèche-born face into the aggressive mask most humans
wore in public.

Arkady gave the Interfaither another surreptitious glance, only to find the man still staring at him. Their
eyes locked. The Interfaither turned away, still holding Arkady’s gaze, and spit on the floor.

“Creature of magicians,” the woman muttered, “return to your dust!”

“What?” Arkady asked, though he knew somehow that the words were a response to the Interfaither.

“It’s from the Talmud.” Again that black inward gaze as she tapped RAM or slipped into the spinstream.
“Then Rabbah created a man and sent him to Rabbi Zera. Rabbi Zera spoke to him but received
no answer. Thereupon he said to him: ‘Creature of the magicians, return to your dust!’ That’s how
the first golem died.”

“What’s a golem?” Arkady asked.

“A man without a soul.” Her laugh was as hard-bitten as everything else about her. “You.”

Arkady heaved a shaky breath that ended in a bout of coughing. He was running a fever, his immune
system kicking into overdrive to answer the insult of being stuck in a closed environment with thousands
of unfamiliar human pathogens. He hoped it was just allergies. He couldn’t afford to get sick now. And
he didn’t even want to think about what the UN’s human doctors would make of his
decidedly-posthuman immune system.

He lifted his glass and sipped cautiously from it. Beer. And not as bad as it smelled. Still, he didn’t like
the cold skin of condensation that had already formed on the glass. It was a sure sign that the station was
underpowered and overpopulated, its life-support systems dangerously close to redlining. A Syndicate
station whose air was this bad would have been shutting down nonessential operations and shipping its
crèchelings to the neighbors just to be on the safe side. But people here were carrying on as usual. And
on the way to the meet Arkady had passed a group of completely unsupervised children playing
dangerously far from the nearest blowout shelter. You could spend years listening to people talk about
the cheapness of life in human space, but it didn’t really come home to you until you saw something like
this…

You were wrong, Arkasha. They’re another species. We’re divided by our history, by our ideology,
by the very genes we hold in common. All we share is the memory of what Earth was before we
killed it.



Her name was Osnat.

Hebrew? German? Ethiopian?

Arkasha would have known which half-dead language had spawned such a name. It was exactly the kind
of thing Arkasha had always known. And exactly the kind of thing Arkady had never learned for himself
because he’d always thought Arkasha, or someone like Arkasha, would be there to tell him.