"Charles Stross - Duat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

"Going to -- " A basin appeared in her hands and Oshi doubled over it, stomach heaving.
She brought up a thin, bitter mucus that left a metallic taste in her mouth. Be sick. The
gravity was light -- two thirds of normal, or less -- but even so Oshi was in difficulties.
"Ack." There was a hand at her face, gently rubbing with a towel: she recoiled, shocked to
realise that it was a human hand.

"There's no intelligent environment here," Raisa commented under her breath, way too
close to Oshi for comfort. " Shit, why do I get to handle the first outsider we get?"

Oshi saw red; angry and humiliated, her defences at an unprofessional low, she pulled
back and took a loose swipe at Raisa. And missed -- her reflexes were still annealing,
stitching themselves seamlessly into her synapses with the precision that only
nanomachinery could achieve. She was as uncoordinated as an eight year-old. "Aagh."

The other woman must have thought she was flailing for balance, falling over. "You need
to sit down, you know that?" She wrapped an overly-familiar arm around Oshi's waist
again. Oshi leaned on it, staggered round, and caught a glimpse of herself in the active
mirror. Gasped.

She was a sight to behold; deathly pale, thin to the point of anorexia, skin still soft from
the Gatecoder tank. Her scalp was ringed with an exotic fungal infestation, a gene-tailored
mycosis that was now slowly withdrawing from her skull. (For a month it had pumped
strange carrier proteins and stranger nucleic acids into her slowly forming cerebrum,
softening it up for her personality invasion.) Only now was she really a person, the
intricate program of her personality running on the virtual machinery of her brain.

"You've got to take it easy," Raisa told her. "You haven't had time to develop skeletal
muscle tone yet; your body's still a bit soft ... " She poked Oshi's ribs with a sharp finger,
then gently forced her to sit down again. "Our biomass budget's been hit," she added
conversationally: "before long the dog-head will be making us farm the crops by hand."

"Dirt farming?" Dog-head? Oshi was too stunned by her own appearance to follow
through. I look like a corpse. Normally when she gated into a system she came out of the

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2: In the Duat

resynthesis box at least looking like herself. All systems go, a working body with ready-
boosted reflexes and muscles that worked. Not like a skeleton with ringworm. "What's
going on --" In my own body, she wanted to say, but the words stuck in her throat like
bones.

"Ask Anubis. I'm sure he'll explain everything that's going on in the most amazingly clear
way." Oshi couldn't tell whether she was serious or sarcastic. "We're prisoners. We don't
have the schematics to build an outbound Dreamtime link, and we don't have the brains to
re-invent it. Anubis has one, but he's not talking -- which may not be a bad thing. We're
lucky to be alive." Her arms tightened around Oshi's waist like a vice, trapping her from
behind -- "When we first arrived -- the pathfinder colony, two hundred of us -- we tried to
figure out what's happening. Some of us tried to put up a fight, got zapped for their
trouble. See ... " Raisa snapped the fingers of her free hand and Oshi smelled walnuts,