"Bruce Sterling & Lewis Shiner - Mozart in Mirrorshades" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

The boy turned the volume down as Rice walked toward him. “Good evening, Mr. Plant Manager, sir. I am not
interrupting?”

“No, that’s okay.” Rice glanced at the bristling hedgehog cut that had replaced the boy’s outmoded wig. He’d seen
kid around the gates; he was one of the regulars. But the music had made something else fall into place. “You’re Mozar
aren’t you?”

“Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, your servant.”

“I’ll be goddamned. Do you know what that tape is?”

“It has my name on it.”

“Yeah. You wrote it. Or would have, I guess I should say. About fifteen years from now.”

Mozart nodded. “It is so beautiful. I have not the English to say how it is to hear it.”

By this time most of the other gate people would have been well into some kind of pitch. Rice was impressed by the
boy’s tact, not to mention his command of English. The standard native vocabulary didn’t go much beyondradio ,drugs
fuck . “Are you headed back toward town?” Rice asked.

“Yes, Mr. Plant Manager, sir.”

Something about the kid appealed to Rice. The enthusiasm, the gleam in the eyes. And, of course, he did happen to
one of the greatest composers of all time.

“Forget the titles,” Rice said. “Where does a guy go for some fun around here?”

***

AT FIRSTSutherland hadn’t wanted Rice at the meeting with Jefferson. But Rice knew a little temporal physics, and
Jefferson had been pestering the American personnel with questions about time holes and parallel worlds.

Rice, for his part, was thrilled at the chance to meet Thomas Jefferson, the first President of the United States. He’d
never liked George Washington, was glad the man’s Masonic connections had made him refuse to join the company’s
“godless” American government.

Rice squirmed in his Dacron double knits as he and Sutherland waited in the newly air-conditioned boardroom of th
Hohensalzburg Castle. “I forgot how greasy these suits feel,” he said.

“At least,” Sutherland said, “you didn’t wear that goddamned hat today.” The VTOL jet from America was late, an
kept looking at her watch.

“My tricorne?” Rice said. “You don’t like it?”

“It’s a Masonista hat, for Christ’s sake. It’s a symbol of anti-modern reaction.” The Freemason Liberation Front w
another of Sutherland’s nightmares, a local politico-religious group that had made a few pathetic attacks on the pipeline.

“Oh, loosen up, will you, Sutherland? Some groupie of Mozart’s gave me the hat. Theresa Maria Angela
something-or-other, some broken-down aristocrat. They all hang out together in this music dive downtown. I just liked