"Charles Stross - Yellow snow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

"No. I want some names, nothing else. Like who shifts your stuff."
His face cleared, magically. "You want some?" he asked, happily. "I sell you – "
"No," I said, "I just want a name."
"Oh." He looked disappointed. Then, "are you polizei?"
I weighed my chances. "Would you believe if I said no?"
"No." His eyes narrowed.
"Then get lost." I gave him a push and he went. His sister had vanished into an open
shopfront selling gauzy somethings under spotlights; for the moment at least they were zero
factors in my equation. I stood alone for a while, wondering what I looked like to the local
talent and whether I needed a new line; some nagging doubt kept telling me that I was getting
too old for this game. Trying to quell my worry I crossed to the observation deck and looked
out.
The mall was descending towards a park with a lake around it, and a landscaped
garden at one end of the lake. Ant City floated like a submarine in an inclusion of melt-water
beneath the ice cap. Kept from freezing by the tokamaks, the water acted as a buffer against
icequakes; also as central heating. The lift was just now dropping out of the roof of the city,
and the view was dizzying; the city curved with the horizon. Suddenly I had a sense of
imminence, of seeing a new frontier opening up before me even though the underground was
actually closing in for real, like the dizzying megatonnes of ice overhead: it was shaping up to
be a classic revelation. The kind of sensation you get when a new idea is coming up hot and
hard. I took stock of my situation –
So consider me: male, self-contained, intelligent, age twenty-seven. The product of
an expensive corporate shockwave education, designed to surf over new developments on
the cutting edge of R&D. I'd freebased from my corporate owners: only time and
independence had cost me my flexibility. I had bank accounts in Liechtenstein and Forties
Field, no commitments, but I was unable to access the big company AI's, my knowledge was
going rusty in the face of informational explosion; I was staring career burnout in the face at
thirty. I had pushed every synthetic narcotic I could make, but only in small-to-medium scale
production: I had always managed to skip out before the blowback. Hit and run. I didn't use
them myself, but supplied a demand; I made people happy for a living. What could be better
than that? I liked to consider myself to be a moral anarchist, Kropotkins' heir. Only where was
I going to go next?
There's always time for another drug or craze; time for it to reach peak saturation, to
maximize the number of receptors ... every drug has its day! But in this age I was slowly
turning into a classicist; I sold old clean shit with none of your new hoodoo metabolic mania to
retool the human genome for optimal thrust. That made me techo-obsolescent. Things were
moving too fast for people like me to keep up; not every dealer wanted to turn their skull into
a gene-machine for the recombinant receptor-affinity tuning that passed for heavy shit these
days. Frankly, I was lousy at genetic programming; as likely to come up with a new disease
as a saleable product. But there was a blindingly obvious solution staring me in the face, and
I knew just where to find it; all I needed was a link.
I found a phone and used it to find a list of rented accomodation; I chose a flat,
furnished, four rooms, monthly payments, good view of the park. If I hadn't been speeding a
week ago it would have cost an arm and a leg, or at least a kidney. Now all I had to do was
make the right contact; and that, for someone of my background, was easy.
We met in a cafe on the edge of a drained swimming pool, where the penguins
jostled excitedly for scraps from the tables. She looked nervous, which was to be expected. I
was, too. I didn't even know how much she wanted for the job! Just that she was as
desperate as I was.
"What you're looking for ... " she said; "dangerous, you know? The temporal