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

"You're in a nasty mood today."

"My father's been murdered!"

"It's not like you two got along all that well. You had a big fight the last time you saw him."

Phil sighed as if his heart would break. "Poor Da. I wish I could see him just one more time." Up above the rainy
freeway was a big sign temporarily wrapped in black plastic, the wind picking at the plastic and making it flap and
billow in a way that spooked Phil. It was like a shroud. The brutal synchronicity of the universe displaying this just for
him. Phil shuddered; the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.

February 14

On Saturday they held the memorial service on the grounds of the Bass School, the private school where Kurt had
worked. A quartet of students played sweet music on violin, viola, flute, and harp. A big redwood towered overhead,
fog in its branches. It had rained all night, but now the sky was clearing. The mourners sat in folding chairs on the flat
ground in front of the school's main building, an enormous old two-story house, all glass and redwood, the home of a
deceased software tycoon, the Bass of Bass school.

People took turns getting up and saying things about Kurt Gottner. Phil didn't feel able to speak. If he opened his
mouth he'd be likely to start howling. Why expose himself like that, especially with all the Bass mucky-mucks here?
Though he'd gone to Bass School for four years, Phil had no great love for the place. Da had met Willow Chen through
Bass —she was a professional fund-raiser who did contract work —and Phil tended irrationally to blame Bass for his
parents' breakup.

Phil's mother Eve had pulled Phil and Jane out of Bass after the breakup, and from then on they'd gone to public
school — which had been, on the whole, more fun. The larger classes of the public school made it likelier that you
could find a kindred spirit. And public school had moldies working as teachers' aides. You could learn a lot really fast
from an uvvy link with a moldie. Bass, on the other hand, prided itself on being moldie-free. Eve hated Bass. According
to her, the students and faculty at Bass were a pack of freaks and losers, and the parents of the Bass kids were snobby
self-indulgent artsy-fartsy crypto-Heritagist poseurs trying to buy themselves the illusion that their neurotic
drug-addicted promiscuous bulimic dyslexic brats had one single grain of brains or talent. This, Eve's opinion. Phil,
however, had found many of the Bass teachers quaint and nice. Especially his father.

At the funeral, Eve sat at left end of the front row, next to Phil, Jane, Kevvie, Willow, Willow's mother Jia, Da's brother
Rex, Rex's wife Zsuzsi, Rex and Zsuzsi's daughters Gina and Mary, Kurt and Rex's mother Isolde, and Isolde's kind old
sister Hildegarde, whose face could stop a clock.

Rex got up and spoke a little, about how Kurt had always been accident-prone as a child. "One time when Kurt was
little he fell off his bicycle and I carried him home. A few years later he broke his ankle in a soccer game and a friend
and I carried him home. Today's the last time we'll do it. We're carrying Kurt home."

Not that there was going to be much of Kurt to carry. The gimmie had scraped together maybe an ounce of blood and
tissue-fragments. After freezing a sample of the DNA, the gimmie had incinerated the remains for Willow, who'd placed
the ashes in a tiny octagonal madrone-wood box. The box sat before the mourners on a small Oriental rug on the
ground.

Isolde got up and talked about Kurt as a child. She was a little woman with white hair and a strong voice. "Kurt was a
wise soul," said Isolde. "He knew more than other people. He was shy and he didn't like to talk about it, but I could