"Alastair Reynolds - Diamond Dogs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

'And should I at any point weary of your company?'
'You have my word that I'll let you leave.'
I decided to play along with him for the time being. Childe and I took the volantor's front pair of seats.
Once ensconced, I turned around to acquaint myself with the other passenger, and then flinched as I saw
him properly.
He wore a high-necked leather coat which concealed much of the lower half of his face. The upper part
was shadowed under the generous rim of a Homburg, tipped down to shade his brow. Yet what remained
visible was sufficient to shock me. There was only a blandly handsome silver mask; sculpted into an
expression of quiet serenity. The eyes were blank silver surfaces, what I could see of his mouth a thin,
slightly smiling slot.
'Doctor Trintignant,' I said.
He reached forward with a gloved hand, allowing me to shake it as one would the hand of a woman.
Beneath the black velvet of the glove I felt armatures of hard metal. Metal that could crush diamond.
'The pleasure is entirely mine,' he said.


Airborne, the volantor's baroque ornamentation melted away to mirror-smoothness. Childe pushed
ivory-handled control sticks forward, gaining altitude and speed. We seemed to be moving faster than the
city ordinances allowed, avoiding the usual traffic corridors. I thought of the way he had followed me,
researched my past and had my own volantor desert me. It would also have taken considerable
resourcefulness to locate the reclusive Trintignant and persuade him to emerge from hiding.
Clearly Childe's influence in the city exceeded my own, even though he had been absent for so long.
'The old place hasn't changed much,' Childe said, swooping us through a dense conglomeration of
golden buildings, as extravagantly tiered as the dream pagodas of a fever-racked Emperor.
'Then you've really been away? When you told me you'd faked your death, I wondered if you'd just
gone into hiding.'
He answered with a trace of hesitation, 'I've been away, but not as far as you'd think. A family matter
came up that was best dealt with confidentially, and I really couldn't be bothered explaining to everyone
why I needed some peace and quiet on my own.'
'And faking your death was the best way to go about it?'
'Like I said, I couldn't have planned the Eighty if I'd tried. I had to bribe a lot of minor players in the
project, of course, and I'll spare you the details of how we provided a corpse . . . but it all worked
swimmingly, didn't it?'
'I never had any doubts that you'd died along with the rest of them.'
'I didn't like deceiving my friends. But I couldn't go to all that trouble and then ruin my plan with a few
indiscretions.'
'You were friends, then?' solicited Trintignant.
 'Yes, Doctor,' Childe said, glancing back at him. 'Way back when. Richard and I were rich kids -
relatively rich, anyway -with not enough to do. Neither of us were interested in the stock market or the
social whirl. We were only interested in games.'
'Oh. How charming. What kinds of game, might I ask?'
'We'd build simulations to test each other - extraordinarily elaborate worlds filled with subtle dangers
and temptations. Mazes and labyrinths; secret passages; trapdoors; dungeons and dragons. We'd spend
months inside them, driving each other crazy. Then we'd go away and make them even harder.'
'But in due course you grew apart,' the Doctor said. His synthesised voice had a curious piping quality.
'Yeah,' Childe said. 'But we never stopped being friends. It was just that Richard had spent so much
time devising increasingly alien scenarios that he'd become more interested in the implied psychologies
behind the tests. And I'd become interested only in the playing of the games; not their construction.
Unfortunately Richard was no longer there to provide challenges for me.'
'You were always much better than me at playing them,' I said. 'In the end it got too hard to come up