"Rudy Rucker - Realware" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

"I've got it!" interrupted Kevvie. "Flying saucers took them! Have you ever seen a flying saucer, Yoke?"

"I saw the real aliens who were on the Moon in November," said Yoke. "But they didn't come in any flying machine.
They travel in a form like radio waves."

"I don't buy that," said Kevvie, with irrational vehemence. Phil realized that she was lifted. "If those things you saw
were really aliens, there has to have been a saucer that they came in. They use a special metal. I bet ISDN or the gimmie
is covering it up."

"There goes a saucer now, Kevvie," said Tre, pointing up at the sky. "Yaaar." He had long, tangled, sun-bleached hair
and he wore weird little brown sunglasses over his no doubt bloodshot eyes. Once he'd gotten Kevvie to start staring
upward, Tre looked back down. "What Yoke was talking about, Phil, is that Darla and Whitey had a wowo in their
cubby. Only nobody saw Darla dying, so it didn't occur to anyone that the wowo might have been involved. I should
have thought of it when Tempest Plenty disappeared last month. She was the aunt of our neighbor Starshine Plenty;
we were putting Tempest up in one of our spare rooms."

Phil could tell Kevvie wanted to butt in and say something else dumb, but Terri spoke first. "Tempest was this colorful
redneck pheezer," said Terri. "A dynamo. Mean as a snake. A lifter. She liked to work on Starshine's garden, always
talking a mile a minute, whether or not anyone was listening. And then one morning she was gone, along with
Starshine's wowo and Starshine's dog Planet. Starshine figured Tempest had taken the dog and the wowo back to
Florida. She says most of the people in her family are like that. Rip something off and head for home."

"The wowo Tempest took was in Starshine's garden," continued Tre. "It was the best and biggest wowo I ever made,
but the base only weighed a couple of pounds. Tempest loved to look at it, especially when she was lifted. And she
was crazy about that dog. So what Starshine thought seemed reasonable. We were like, 'So what, at least Tempest's
gone.' But then — mur!—Willow saw the wowo swallow Kurt and I put it all together. I switched off all the wowos that
I've distributed."

"How did you manage that?" demanded Kevvie.

"All of my Philosophical Toys maintain an uvvy link to me. That way I can send out upgrades and — in the case of a
catastrophe like this —I can shut them down." Although Tre looked like a Santa Cruz lifter, his Philosophical Toys had
made him reasonably wealthy, and he ran his business in an orderly and efficient way. "I've been wanting to ask
Willow for a really detailed description of how it went down. But I don't want to tweak her out."

"You should see what Jane has," said Phil. "Hey, Jane!"

Jane was still in conversation with old Isolde and Hildegarde, and she gave Phil a sisterly "How rude!" kind of look, a
big jokey frown. Isolde and Hildegarde used the interruption to begin creeping toward the buffet.

"What?" said Jane, giving Phil a gratuitous poke in the ribs as she joined them.

"Show Tre the ring."

"Way eldritch," said Tre as soon as he saw it. "Knotted in the fourth dimension. Like a calling card. Like it wants us to
know."

"It?" said Phil.