"Charles Stross - Generation Gap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

wrong with the kiddies, I think.
"Is there a name to match this identity, perchance?" she asked.
"Yes. Jerzy." Pronounced Cher-Tsee. "Hope you match abstracts."
Mom rolled off the foam and bounced to her feet. "Do you, Fa?" She grinned like an
electrical discharge in air. "See you in person."
"In person," I echoed. Feel so distant, I wondered. What's wrong with me?
 Jerzy arrived, glamorous and beautiful. We spent minutes in rapt mutual admiration.
Basking in a glow of self confidence. He sat at the base of our tree, outside the bole which
concealed the door, and I sat beside him. Careful not to disturb his cosmetic artifice by
contact; tigerstriped microtexture to face and body converted him into a baroque feline
sapient. His skirt matched, too.
"Did you find what you were looking for on your walk?" I asked, artlessly. He draped
an arm across my shoulders, casual and superb.
"Yes," he admitted after a lengthy pause. "Optic homing beacon for express. If we
can fix the backup systems – " he left the rest unverbalized. A passing police videomouse
might overhear and correlate (direct mindtap being violation of human rights). Secrecy lay in
bussing or in ellipsis.
"I hope this is the right way to test it," I verbalised. "It's got to be done as a double
blind, but the panic... " He hugged me.
"Unquantifiable. Can kiddies panic? Some emotional states may be non-mappable.
How old's your mother?"
"My what?" I was taken aback.
"Your mother. Physiological originator." He flushed slightly at such irreverence, but
paused for response.
"I never met him," I explained, "but I should guess at least a century. Maybe more –
great-great-granddad is ancient. And he shows up pretty often."
But just then Syrinx arrived; I could see this leading to identity interpolation,
subsequent confusion. "Jerzy," I said, "meet Syrinx. Friend of Mom's." That was mega
understatement. Jerzy looked up, bared teeth, gaped in what looked like a manic vampire
attack, and said, "Hello." (Big anticlimax.)
Syrinx grinned back. "You could say so," he insinuated. A thought occurred to me;
had they met? I asked Wisdom, which asked LAZ, who didn't know.
"Am I too late?" I asked neither of them in particular. Jerzy recovered first.
"Definitely," he agreed. "Met on surface, not long ago."
"Precisely," said Syrinx, grin down-modulating to scowl. "Not in best of
circumstances." A man of tungsten, notwithstanding his kevlar infrastructure. "Well, cheer up.
You're not disrupting dinner, either or both of you. Injustice to food!" Somehow I didn't
imagine the food cared. I made a Wisdom scratchpad entry to query Jerzy at leisure.
Took man and factotum by the hand, stepped up through bole, and arrived.
Remembered, blindingly fast, as passed entrance; Syrinx is police analyst! Terrible oversight
– should never have invited Jerzy. But it was too late. Mom had ordered dinner; multi-course
spectacular. Main item was braised long pork, probably synthetic but tasted like real thing.
We ate and chatted and filtered perceptions through a matrix she'd developed for the
event, a hallucinatory experience in which senses became confused, crystal-clear. Syrinx
seemed distracted; I asked him why.
"Busy," he replied, "doing downtime for LAZ. Trying to trace suspected Triumvirate
infiltration among insect life. Never let anyone misinform you: biological vetting is boring!" He
scooped a chunk of meat into his mouth, sizzling hot. With gusto. I wondered if he suspected
he was sitting opposite secret weapon. Jerzy restrained himself, no stolen glances detected.
He and Syrinx, it devolved, had met in vicinity of hyperbahn surface; had watched a