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

signaling interest to the monitors embedded within her.

A hallucination of raw text spiraled up the inside of her eyelids, coarse as sandpaper -- the
Boss preferred writing to speech, for some reason. Important news. Important
news. Confirmation is achieved; satisfaction guaranteed.
Our stock is rising, the enemy dying. It will soon be time
to set sail for pastures new. Oshi Adjani, I wish to speak
with you in the throne room, at your earliest convenience.

"Ack." Working her jaws to swallow her disgust, Oshi glanced at Helmut. "Did you get
that?"

"Get what?" His knowing smirk told her all she needed to know.

"Meet you later," she said tersely. "I'm off." Up the corridor and away. "Damn."

Oshi didn't want to be around other people right now. It wasn't anything she could
articulate: a fear of confronting what she'd done, perhaps, tainted with revulsion at the
other station occupants' unfeeling voyeurism. (Everyone she met fawned over her,
wanting to know: what was it like?) Since leaving New Salazar she carried a creeping
sense of guilt. It was as if righteous fury could decay to uncertainty and the nasty paranoia
of a middle-aged war criminal waiting for the police to knock on the door. She had been
tempted to bite Helmut's head off: not a tactful move to make on one's physician. But he
made her nervous. Just another nasty staring presence hanging around her, reeking of
prurient curiosity. (Ask the hangman: what was it like?) She couldn't shake off the feeling
that everyone know exactly what she'd done. It was everywhere in the air of the station,
the stench of an original sin.

Oshi flew round the bend and into a drop tube running between levels. She clung to a vine
and let it pull her along, wafting past stands of succulent cacti tended by hoverfly robots
the size of gnats. Given the burden of memories she carried, she decided, she felt
remarkably empty. Scooped out, as if Year Zero Man had deprived her of insight into her

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20Duat%20(ss).html (4 of 103)4-7-2007 2:25:58
2: In the Duat

purpose. She shook her head, trying to clear the fog in it, edgily wondering what this
could all mean. The Boss wanted to talk to her in person -- through His incarnate body --
and in her experience interviews with the management always boded ill.

Whoever designed the throne room had lacked all sense of humour, not to mention
proportion. It was a parody of a mediaeval court: it nested deep inside the asteroid station,
close by the battery of fusion reactors that powered the installation. The decor was a study
in pointlessness: rectilinear walls lined with spurious flying butresses, vegetable fibre
tapestries, steps leading up to the throne itself, steps in zero gee. The Boss used it as a
setting when he wanted he address the troops, declare stock options, congratulate or
punish loyal workers and miscreants. Oshi hated it. It reminded her of other places, long
ago. The air tasted of bullshit. Worse, whenever she spoke to the Boss -- which was rarely
-- she had a nagging sense that he knew everything she was about to say before she
framed it with her lips.