"Charles Stross - Trunk and Disorderly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

“Dash it all, not again!” I leaned my forehead against the wall. “Why
now, of all times?” Picking a fight then leaving me right before a drop was
one of her least endearing habits. This was the fifth time. She usually came
back right afterward, when she was loose and lubed from witnessing me
scrawl my butchness across the sky, but it never failed to make me feel like
an absolute bounder at the time; it’s a low blow to strike a cove right before
he tries to drill a hole in the desert at mach twenty-five, what? But you can’t
take femmes for granted, whether they be squish or clankie, and her
accusation wasn’t, I am bound to admit, entirely baseless.

I wandered into the parlor and stood between the gently rusting
ancestral space suits, overcome by an unpleasant sense of aimless
tension. I couldn’t decide whether I should go back to the simulator and
practice my thermal curves again—balancing on a swaying meter-wide slab
of ablative foam in the variable dynamic forces of atmospheric re-entry, a
searing blow-torch flare of hot plasma surging past, bare centimeters
beyond my helmet—or get steaming drunk. And I hate dilemmas; there’s
something terribly non-U about having to actually think about things.

You can never get in too much practice before a freestyle
competition, and I had seen enough clowns drill a scorched hole in the
desert that I was under no illusions about my own invincibility, especially as
this race was being held under mortal jeopardy rules. On the other hand,
Laura’s walk-out had left me feeling unhinged and unbalanced, and I’m
never able to concentrate effectively in that state. Maybe a long, hot bath
and a bottle of sake would get me over it so I could practice later; but
tonight was the pre-drop competitors’ dinner. The club prefers members to
get their crashing and burning done before the race—something to do with
minimizing our third-party insurance premium, I gather—so it’s fried snacks
all round, then a serving of rare sirloin, and barely a drop of the old firewater
all night. So I was perched on the horns of an acute dilemma—to tipple or
topple as it were—when the room phone cleared its throat obtrusively.

“Ralph? Ralphie? Are you all right?”

I didn’t need the screen to tell me it was Fiona, my half-sister. Typical
of her to call at a time like this. “Yes,” I said wearily.
 “You don’t sound it!” she said brightly. Fi thinks that negative
emotions are an indicator of felonious intent.

“Laura just walked out on me again and I’ve got a drop coming up
tomorrow,” I moaned.

“Oh Ralphie, stop angsting! She’ll be back in a week when she’s run
the script. You worry too much about her, she can look after herself. I was
calling to ask, are you going to be around next week? I’ve been invited to a
party Geraldine Ho is throwing for the downhill cross-country skiing season
on Olympus Mons, but my house-sitter phoned in pregnant unexpectedly
and my herpetologist is having another sex change so I was just hoping
you’d be able to look after Jeremy for me while I’m gone, just for a couple