"Bruce Sterling - Bicycle Repairman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

glanced at his palmtop notepad. "You still taking deliveries for Edward Dertouzas?"
"Yeah. I guess so." Lyle rubbed the gear tattoo on one stubbled cheek. "If I have to."
The kid offered a stylus, reaching up. "Can you sign for him?"
Lyle folded his bare arms warily. "Naw, man, I can't sign for Deep Eddy. Eddy's in Europe
somewhere. Eddy left months ago. Haven't seen Eddy in ages."
The delivery kid scratched his sweating head below his billed fabric cap. He turned to check
for any possible sneak-ups by snatch-and-grab artists out of the squatter warrens. The
government simply refused to do postal delivery on the Thirty-second, Thirty-third, and Thirty-
fourth floors. You never saw many cops inside the zone, either. Except for the city demolition
crew, about the only official functionaries who ever showed up in the zone were a few
psychotically empathetic NAFTA social workers.
"I'll get a bonus if you sign for this thing." The kid gazed up in squint-eyed appeal. "It's gotta
be worth something, Lyle. It's a really weird kind of routing, they paid a lot of money to send it
just that way."
Lyle crouched down in the open doorway. "Let's have a look at it."
The package was a heavy shockproof rectangle in heat-sealed plastic shrink-wrap, with a
plethora of intra-European routing stickers. To judge by all the overlays, the package had been
passed from postal system to postal system at least eight times before officially arriving in the
legal custody of any human being. The return address, if there had ever been one, was completely
obscured. Someplace in France, maybe.
Lyle held the box up two-handed to his ear and shook it. Hardware.
"You gonna sign, or not?"
"Yeah." Lyle scratched illegibly at the little signature panel, then looked at the delivery trike.
"You oughta get that front wheel trued."
The kid shrugged. "Got anything to send out today?"
"Naw," Lyle grumbled, "I'm not doing mail-order repair work anymore; it's too complicated
and I get ripped off too much."
"Suit yourself." The kid clambered into the recumbent seat of his trike and pedaled off across
the heat-cracked ceramic tiles of the atrium plaza.
Lyle hung his hand-lettered OPEN FOR BUSINESS sign outside the door. He walked to his
left, stamped up the pedaled lid of a jumbo garbage can, and dropped the package in with the rest
of Dertouzas's stuff.
The can's lid wouldn't close. Deep Eddy's junk had finally reached critical mass. Deep Eddy
never got much mail at the shop from other people, but he was always sending mail to himself.
Big packets of encrypted diskettes were always arriving from Eddy's road jaunts in Toulouse,
Marseilles, Valencia, and Nice. And especially Barcelona. Eddy had sent enough gigabyte-age
out of Barcelona to outfit a pirate data-haven.
Eddy used Lyle's bike shop as his safety-deposit box. This arrangement was okay by Lyle. He
owed Eddy; Eddy had installed the phones and virching in the bike shop, and had also wangled
the shop's electrical hookup. A thick elastic curly-cable snaked out the access-crawlspace of
Floor 35, right through the ceiling of Floor 34, and directly through a ragged punch-hole in the
aluminum roof of Lyle's cable-mounted mobile home. Some unknown contact of Eddy's was
paying the real bills on that electrical feed. Lyle cheerfully covered the expenses by paying cash
into an anonymous post-office box. The setup was a rare and valuable contact with the world of
organized authority.
During his stays in the shop, Eddy had spent much of his time buried in marathon long-
distance virtuality sessions, swaddled head to foot in lumpy strap-on gear. Eddy had been
painfully involved with some older woman in Germany. A virtual romance in its full-scale
thumping, heaving, grappling progress, was an embarrassment to witness. Under the
circumstances, Lyle wasn't too surprised that Eddy had left his parents' condo to set up in a squat.