"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - The Room of Lost Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

THE ROOM OF LOST SOULS
by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s latest novel is The Recovery Man (Roc 2007), the
latest stand-alone book in the award-nominated Retrieval Artist series. The
author just completed a book tour of France for her Kris Nelscott mystery
series. Yet, with all this novel writing, she still finds time for shorter works.
Recent tales include novellas in Mike Resnick’s Alien Crimes and Lou
Anders’ upcoming Sideways in Crime, along with stories for Asimov’s, and
other SF and mystery magazines. In “The Room of Lost Souls,” Kris
presents us with a deep-space mystery. This tale revisits the milieu of her
December 2005 Readers’ Award winning novella, “Diving Into the Wreck.”

****

The old spacer’s bar on Longbow Station is the only bar there that doesn’t
have a name. No name, no advertising across the door or the back wall, no
cute little logos on the magnetized drinking cups. The door is recessed into
a grungy wall that looks like it’s temporary due to construction.

To get in, you need one of two special chips. The first is
hand-held—given by the station manager after careful consideration. The
second is built into your ID. You get that one if you’re a legitimate spacer,
operating or working for a business that requires a pilot’s license.

I have had the second chip since I was the first woman ever to join a
crew on an until-then male only freighter. I was just eighteen years old. I’ve
been using the chip more and more these last few years, since I
discovered a wrecked Dignity Vessel that I thought I could mine for gold.

Instead, that ship mined me.

Now I take tourists to established wrecks all over this sector. I
coordinate the trip, collect the money and hire the divers who’ll make those
tourists believe they’re doing real wreck-diving.

Tourists never do real wreck diving. It’s too dangerous. The process
gets its name from the dangers: in olden days, wreck diving was called
space diving to differentiate it from the planet-side practice of diving into
the oceans.

We don’t face water here—we don’t have its weight or its unusual
properties, particularly at huge depths. We have other elements to concern
us: No gravity, no oxygen, extreme cold.
 Those risks exist no matter what kind of wrecks we dive. So I
minimize everything else: I make sure the wrecks are known, mapped, and
harmless.

I haven’t lost any tourists. But I have lost friends to real wreck diving.
And several times, I’ve almost lost myself.