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

something strangely musty as the active mirror flickered into a picture of a different scene
-- "this is where we are. Welcome to hell, Oshi Adjani, welcome to the Duat. Chill down
and learn to like it ... because if you don't, there's nowhere else to go."

Oshi lay in a different room. The light was dim, signifying night, but the morning
heaviness in her arms and the prickling in her eyes told her otherwise. What did she call
this place: the Duat? Strange ...

She tried to remember Raisa's face, but it slipped away like a blur of blind-spot retinal
damage as if someone had shone a laser in her eyes. She stared at the ceiling, scant
centimetres above her nose; raw wooden planks fitted together with the lopsided
roughness of human carpentry. The bedding under her felt like a futon, raw cotton in a
loose sleeve. There were noises, smells, taste and touch: a faint pulse of mechanical
energy beneath the small of her back, hydraulic purge chambers breathing the waste of the
machine far below her. It can't be an asteroid. This place must be an oneil. It was not a
good omen. The artificial colonies, colossal pressurized cylinders lined with farmland, had
a lousy reputation for ecological trouble; exposure to cosmic radiation with only a couple
of metres of aluminium for armour didn't make for stable biospheres.

She lay still for a long time, re-learning the feel of her own body. She was still weak from
the tank. She recalled how she'd slumped against Raisa's shoulder after her first sight of
the Duat. How her knees had turned to jelly. It's not just the gatecoder that's fucked. How
it had managed to download her at all, ten percent underweight but with a full
complement of viscera and a working neuroendoderm ... it was a miracle of the wrong
kind. I should be working, she thought abstractedly.

After a long time, she rolled over on her side. Blinking away black spots from the
exertion, she looked around. The room beyond her sleeping niche was small and sparsely
furnished: it contained a low table, two rough stools, and a stoneware basin of water.


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2: In the Duat

Raisa had brought her here; she'd thought she'd just lie down for a minute to get her breath
back, but the minute had stretched. The light came from a naked window recessed into
one wall. There was glass in it. Compared to the slums where she had been raised it was a
mansion: but by the standards of a culture that bridged the stars and tamed alien worlds it
was a hovel.

"Shit."

" That is not a recognised command."

"Huh?" Oshi raised herself to one elbow. "Who -- what's that? Identify yourself."

" This is habitat support, verbal interface only. Welcome to
colony unit Ridgegap-47. Today is the fourteenth of
Thermidor, local year fifty-seven post-settlement. The time
is zero two-forty hours. A familiarisation tutorial is on-