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

artist and Calla a genetic counselor, while Phil was a cook in an expensive restaurant. Each of the three lived in their
own cobbled-together wooden box.

Phil's and Calla's boxes were on stilts, and Derek's hung by cables from the ceiling. The huge open warehouse floor
was left free and clear for other purposes. The three boxes were a bit like birdhouses in an aviary—quite literally so in
the case of Phil's, as he'd designed his dwelling from the specs for a traditional pentagonal wren-house like a kid might
bring home from shop class. He'd tried giving his room a round door, but after tripping over the curved threshold a few
times, he'd compromised and made the door's bottom square and flush with his box's floor.

Phil started down his thin little chicken-walk of a staircase. He could see out the windows that lined the tops of the
warehouse's walls: a view of the San Francisco Bay, of a floating gray ship and a docked red ship, of great four-legged
cranes like giraffes or elephants, of concrete dockside elevators, of more warehouses beneath low clouds. Everything
chilled and dismal. A Thursday in February.

High overhead hung a giant twisting model of DNA; this was Calla's. It was made of linked spheres that were hollow
cocoons spun by a fabricant, a little DIM ant that could turn sunlight and wet leaves into filaments of rayon. The DNA
model was a useful thing for Calla to show to her clients, who came here in person when the genetic information that
Calla gave them was so harsh or so strange that uvvy contact wasn't enough. Phil well remembered when his genetic
counselor had laid out his options: abstinence or addiction.

Down on the factory floor, two of Derek's "attractors" were active. One looked like a big wobbly green doughnut, the
other like a purple cow-udder with twisting teats. They were patterns of air currents, flowing volumes of air made
visible by color-lit fogs of vapor, fractally rich with eddies and schlieren. A dozen other attractor-devices sat idle:
cryptic, mute technoclutter. Only when the attractors were powered up did they clothe themselves in beautiful, orderly
chaos. Da's wowo had been a similar kind of thing.

Phil took a shortcut through the doughnut volume, careful not to bang into the machinery at its core. But he stepped
on something anyway, something that yipped. Derek's mutt Umberto. The dog sometimes liked to sleep hidden inside
the doughnut, warmed by the central generator.

"Hush, Umberto," said Phil. "It's okay." If only that were true.

In the bathroom, Phil drank some water. The water on his teeth like a mountain stream. Da dead? It was way too soon.
There was still too much to say to the old man, too much to learn. Now the tears were beginning to come. A rough sob.
He buried his face in a towel.

After a bit, Phil washed off his face with cold water, then cried some more and washed some more. The beautiful
complexity of water, of its sounds and motions. Da wouldn't see water anymore. Phil's dream just before waking—he'd
been climbing the teeth-mountains and —hadn't there been a ball of light in the dream? Phil leaned on the sink, resting
his forehead against the mirror with his eyes closed, trying to look back into his dream. Wouldn't it make sense to have
had a special dream just as his father died? Especially when Da had died so strangely.

"Here's some coffee," said Kevvie, who'd followed him as far as the kitchen —the little area of the factory floor that
passed for a kitchen, a sink and a stove and a table with chairs on the concrete floor beneath the seventy-foot-high
truss-supported corrugated steel ceiling. She'd brought the uvvy as well. "Get away, Umberto," she said, and aimed a
sharp kick at the dog, who'd come over to see if he might get some breakfast. Kevvie couldn't stand Umberto.

"Don't hurt him, Kevvie." Phil took the coffee. "Thanks. I can't believe this. I feel so —it's like my head's exploding.
Life's not a rehearsal. It's real." He took the coffee Kevvie handed him, but set it down without drinking.