"Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space 04 - Absolution Gap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

features of a boxer. He wore a clean white medical smock and apron; his
hands were always gloved. His expression never failed to amuse Jasmina:
it always appeared that he was on the point of breaking into tears or
laughter. It was an illusion: the surgeon-general had little familiarity with
either emotional extreme.
“Busy in the body factory, Grelier?”
“A wee bit, ma’am.”
“I’m anticipating a period of high demand ahead. Production mustn’t
slacken.”
“Little danger of that, ma’am.”
“Just as long as you’re aware of it.” She sighed. “Well, niceties over
with. To business.”
Grelier nodded. “I see you’ve already made a start.”
While awaiting his arrival, she had strapped her body into the throne,
leather cuffs around her ankles and thighs, a thick band around her belly,
her right arm fixed to the chair rest, with only her left arm free to move.
She held the skull in her left hand, its face turned towards her so that she
could view the read-out screens bulging from its eye sockets. Prior to
picking up the skull she had inserted her right arm into a skeletal machine
bracketed to the side of the chair. The machine—the alleviator—was a
cage of rough black ironwork equipped with screw-driven pressure pads.
They were already pressing uncomfortably against her skin.
“Hurt me,” Queen Jasmina said.
Grelier’s expression veered momentarily towards a smile. He
approached the throne and examined the arrangement of the alleviator.
Then he commenced tightening the screws on the device, adjusting each
in sequence by a precise quarter turn at a time. The pressure pads bore
down on the skin of the queen’s forearm, which was supported in turn by
an underlying arrangement of fixed pads. The care with which Grelier
turned the screws made the queen think of someone tuning some ghastly
stringed instrument.
It wasn’t pleasant. That was the point.
After a minute or so, Grelier stopped and moved behind the throne. She
watched him tug a spool of tubing from the little medical kit he always
kept there. He plugged one end of the tubing into an oversized bottle full
of something straw-yellow and connected the other to a hypodermic. He
hummed and whistled as he worked. He lifted up the bottle and attached
it to a rig on the back of the throne, then pushed the hypodermic line into
the queen’s upper right arm, fiddling around a little until he found the
vein. Then she watched him return to the front of the throne, back into
view of the body.
It was a female one this time, but there was no reason that it had to be.
Although all the bodies were cultured from Jasmina’s own genetic
material, Grelier was able to intervene at an early stage of development
and force the body down various sexual pathways. Usually it was boys and
girls. Now and then, for a treat, he made weird neuters and intersex
variants. They were all sterile, but that was only because it would have
been a waste of time to equip them with functioning reproductive
systems. It was enough bother installing the neural coupling implants so
that she could drive the bodies in the first place.