"Charles Stross - Love me" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

suit backpack, switched to her internal air supply, and powered up the door motors, she
was acting on cool-headed necessity rather than random impulse; but her motive was still
a hollow dread.


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20loveme%20(ss).html (14 of 41)4-7-2007 2:25:53
4: Will you still love me ...


She used the reconstructed airlock in what had been the entrance lobby to Anubis' castle.
The doors hummed and slid out mechanically, exposing a view like a diseased eyeball.
Oshi stood in the opening, unable to take in the perspective. A twilit red abyss opened
beneath her feet, swooping into a dizzying space that somehow closed up into a pinprick
pupil far away. A few metres overhead the grey bulk of the redoubt support plunged
outwards, a dim red glow suffusing its surface from the light tubes high above. The veins
of the eye were picked out in roadways and access routes between forests; in the dim
reflection of running water and the blood-clot of a lake hanging overhead. Dim lights
sketched out the habitats and houses of this world, the stumpy blocks of the life-support
centres and transit nodes. But it was too quiet; the normal microwave chatter of the
cyborgs and drones that populated it was gone. And a strange grey fungus was creeping
outwards from a focal point in what had once been the necropolis at Memphis. If the view
was of the inside of an eyeball, then its owner was very definitely dead.

The darkness was oppressive. Oshi edged her way out along a handrail until a ledge
appeared beneath her feet. Then she reached out with her spidery arms and legs, grabbed
hold of the wall, twitched a subverbal command to her exoskeleton. It jolted into
autonomous life, carrying her out along the wall, down to the dying forest floor below.
She permitted himself to feel a momentary relief, but there was too much wrong to feel
normal.

The climb-spider began to run, skipping and sliding down the nearly-vertical surface until
it began to pick up speed under the influence of the centrifugal effect. Then it began
scrabbling to hold itself back, letting the world do the work. Gradually the slope bottomed
out, until presently it was no more than a steep hill with trees growing on it at a strange
angle.

She felt herself slow as the she reached a smooth, flat ribbon of road that ran between the
trees. Where to? she wondered, indecisive, not wanting to commit herself to the finality of
a decision. She looked round. There was a cat, lying curled peacefully beneath a bush to
one side. Her vision amplifiers picked it out, along with the insects crawling over and
through it. Patches of silvery mesh showed through tigerstriped fur in places; a cyborg
spy. She looked away in revulsion, afraid that she knew exactly what she must do next.

The medical centre ... she thought. The essential location. They needed that Gatecoder
unit. The gatecoder kernel was surprisingly small, a customized Von Neumann machine
that carried a parasite module. The parasite, when full grown, was a placentory: a factory
for building human bodies at an accelerated rate. Already she felt the chill wind of fear
breathing down her neck. If the tapeworm's got to it ... she hunkered down in her supports
as her exoskeleton lumbered along the road. The tapeworm Lorma had said, was from the
dark anthropic zone: the sector of the graph of possible universes where human-like life