"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Craters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

The soldiers lean in. They have young faces covered in sand and mud and
three-day-old beards. The same faces I’ve been seeing for years—skin an
indeterminate color, thanks to the sun and the dirt, eyes black or brown or covered
with shades, expressions flat—the youth visible only in the body shape, the lack of
wrinkles and sunlines, the leftover curiosity undimmed by too much death over too
much time.

I lean forward so they can see my face. They don’t recognize me. CNN pays
me, just like the New York Times News Service, just like the Voice of the European
Union. But none of them broadcast or replicate my image.

The woman everyone thinks of as me is a hired face, whose features get
digitized over mine before anything goes out into public. Too many murdered
journalists. Too many famous targets.

The military brass, they know to scan my wrist, send the code into the
Reporter Registry, and get the retinal download that they can double-check against
my eye. But foot soldiers, here on crap duty, they don’t know for nothing.

So they eyeball me, expecting a pretty face—all the studio hires are skinny and
gorgeous—and instead, getting my shoe-leather skin, my dishwater blond going on
steel gray hair, and my seen-too-much eyes. They take in the sweat and the khakis
and the pinkie jacks that look like plastic fingernails.

I wait.

They don’t even confer. The guy in charge waves the jeep forward, figuring, I
guess, that I clean up startlingly well. Before I can say anything, the jeep roars
through the barbed wire into a wide flat street filled with people.

Most cultures call them refugees, but I think of them as the dregs—unwanted
and unlucky, thrown from country to country, or locked away in undesirable land,
waiting for a bit of charity, a change of political fortune, waiting for an understanding
that will never, ever come.

****
The smell hits you first: raw sewage combined with vomit and dysentery. Then the
bugs, bugs like you’ve never seen, moving in swarms, sensing fresh meat.

After your first time with those swarms, you slather illegal bug spray on your
arms, not caring that developed countries banned DDT as a poison/nerve toxin long
ago. Anything to keep those creatures off you, anything to keep yourself alive.

You get out of your jeep, and immediately, the children who aren’t dying
surround you. They don’t want sweets— what a quaint old idea that is—they want
to know what kind of tech you have, what’s buried in your skin, what you carry
under your eyes, what you record from that hollow under your chin. You give them
short answers, wrong answers, answers you’ll regret in the quiet of your hotel room
days later, after you know you’ve made it out to report once more. You remember
them, wonder how they’ll do, hope that they won’t become the ones you see farther