"Larry Niven & Steve Barnes - Achilles choice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Chapter 2


Sean's fingers touched her shoulders, the taste of his kiss still warm on her mouth. His eyes had
left her face, were focused on the line of gleaming tube cars behind her. A pleasantly synthesized
voice sang out the current stream of departures and arrivals for Pittsburgh Central.
She circled his waist, crushing herself against the hard bands of muscle. She fought to
absorb him, impress him upon her memory: ice-blue eyes, thin firm mouth, black hair, Apollonian
torso. A scent tinged with musk and fresh citrus. His heart pounded its languid rhythm, and hers
sped to match it.
"We'll see each other again," he said finally.
"It won't be the same." Damn it, she had promised herself she wouldn't snivel.
"It never is." He tilted her chin up. "And who is it that taught me that?"
She managed a smile, went up to tiptoe, pressing her mouth against his again, lips parted,


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sealing their goodbye with a ferocity that shocked her.
Then she stepped back and, without another word, entered the nearest car on the Denver
platform. She found a seat and threaded her ticket through the chair arm. The door closed behind
her. The line of windowless cars slid forward, like the first moment of a roller coaster ride,
down and down and down.
Part of her had expected the royal treatment, brass bands and ticker tape and a chorus of
hallelujahs to wish her bon voyage. She felt utterly alone.
No one understood the isolation of total discipline. For ten years there had been little
social life, less free time.
Only the endless, grinding cycle of training and research. Ultimately, it had pushed even Sean to
the outside.
At least she had Beverly. Beverly's personality core resided in an optical wafer in her
wallet. She knew she was indulging her paranoia, but it was a conscious indulgence. Once in Denver
she could hook back into Beverly's main banks through Comnet. . . but she had heard horror
stories, and never traveled without a core. Beverly had been her cybernetic nursemaid, childhood
friend, study partner, confidante, and lab assistant. Ultimately, Beverly had been the only
shoulder for Jillian to cry on when her mother died eleven years ago.
She would not risk Beverly.
As she flashed within the earth, as weightless as a lost ghost, she felt that aloneness
more starkly. She seemed to be passing over an invisible meridian. More than time and distance
were being traversed here. And if she made the wrong decision.
She squeezed her eyelids shut, and tried not to think for the rest of her seventy-minute
ride. The train fell through the bowels of the earth at nearly orbital speed. Its silence was
broken only by the thunder of her heartbeat as it returned, stroke by slow stroke, to its resting
pace of forty-six beats a minute.


The Denver station was a honeycomb of concrete and stainless steel, so like the Pittsburgh
depot that it was disorienting. The price of standardization. Transportation had built the depot,
and the Council liked uniformity.
She looked out across the crowd, searching for a familiar face. Only strangers were to be