"Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow - Jury Service" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

you." Huw nearly jumps out of his skin as one of the customs crows lands heavily on his shoulder. "You listening, mate?"
"Yes, yes, I'm listening." Huw shrugs and tries to keep one eye on the big bird. "Over there, huh?"
"Boarding will commence through lift bzzt gurgle four in five minutes. Even-numbered passengers first." The crow flaps heavily towards the
huge, rusting shipping container as it lands in the muddy field with a clang. "All aboard!" it squawks raucously.
Huw wheels his bike towards the steel box then pauses as a door opens and a couple of confused-looking Australian backpackers stumble out,
leading their kangaroo-familiars. "Boarding now!" adds the crow.
Huw waits while the other three passengers step aboard, then gingerly rolls his bike inside and leans against the guardrail spot-glued to the
wall. "Haul away lively, there!" someone yells above, and there's a creak of ropes as the cargo container lurches into the air. Even before it's
clear of the goal posts the huge airship has cut the station-keepers and is spooling up to its impressive fifty knot cruising speed. Huw looks
down at the town and the mediaeval castle unrolling beneath him and takes a deep breath. He can tell this is going to be a long trip.
His nose is itching again.

·····
Air travel is so slow you'd almost always be faster going by train. But the Gibraltar bridge is down for repair again and last time Huw caught a
TGV through the Carpathians he was propositioned incessantly by a feral privatized blood bank that seemed to have a thing for Welsh T-helper
lymphocytes. At least this tramp floater with its cargo of Christmas trees and chameleon paint is going to give Huw and his fellow-passengers a
shortcut around the Mediterranean, even if the common room smells of stale marijuana smoke and the other passengers are all dubious
cheapskate hitchers and netburn cases who want to ship their meatbodies around instead of doing the decent (and sanitary) telepresence thing.
Huw isn't dubious; he's just on jury service, which requires your physical in-the-flesh presence to prevent identity spoofing by imported weakly
godlike AIs and suchlike. But judging from the way the other passengers are avoiding him he looks dubious. Or maybe it's just the biohazard
burka and the many layers of anti-nanophage underwear he's trussed up in underneath it. There has got to be a better way of fighting runaway
technology, he tells himself on the second morning as he prepares to go get some breakfast.
Most of the airship's crew are uplifted gibbons, and during their years of plying the skyways over the Middle East they've picked up enough
Islam that it's murder getting the mess deck food processors to barf up a realistic bacon sandwich. Huw has his mouth-lock extended and is
picking morosely at a scrambled egg and something that claims to be black pudding with his fork when someone bounces into the seat beside
him, reaches into the folds of his burka and tears off a bite of the sandwich.
The stranger is a disreputable backpacker in wash-n-wear tropical-weight everything, the smart-wicking, dirt-shedding, rip-stopping gossamer
uniform of the globe-slogging hostel-denizens who write long, rambling HOWTOs online describing their adventures living in Mumbai or
Manhattan or some other blasted corner of the world for six months on just five dollars. This one clearly fancies himself quite a merry traveller,
eyes a-twinkle, crowsfeet etched by a thousand foreign sunsets, dimples you could lose a fifty-dollar coin in.
" 'ello!" he says, around a mouthful of Huw's sandwich. "You look interesting. Let's have a conversation!"
"You don't look interesting to me," Huw says, plunking the rest of his food on the backpacker's lap. "Let's not."
"Oh, come on," the backpacker says. "My name's Adrian, and I've loads of interesting anecdotes about my adventures abroad, including some
rather racy ones involving lovely foreign ladies. I'm very entertaining, honestly! Give me a try, why don't you?"
"I really don't think so," Huw says, pointedly. "You'd best get back into your seat—the monkeys don't like a disorderly cabin. Besides, I'm
infectious."
"Monkeys! You think I'm worried about monkeys? Brother, I once spent a month in a Tasmanian work-camp for public drunkenness—imagine,
an Australian judge locking an Englishman up for drunkenness! There were some hard men in that camp, let me tell you. The aborigines had the
black-market liquor racket all sewn up, but the Maori prisoners were starting up their own thing, and here's me, a poor, gormless white man in
the middle of it all, dodging home-made shivs and poison arrows. Went a week without eating after it got out that the Maoris were smearing shit
in the cookpots to poison the abos. Biowar, that's what it was! By the end of that week, I was hallucinating angels and chewing scrub-grass I
found on work-details, while the abos I was chained to shat themselves bloody and collapsed. I caught a ballistic out of there an hour after I'd
served my sentence, got shot right to East Timor, where I gorged myself on Gado-Gado and Riztaffel and got food poisoning anyway and spent
the night in the crapper, throwing up my lungs. So don't tell me about monkeys!" Adrian broke off his monologue and began industriously
masticating the rest of Huw's lunch.
"Yes, that's all very disgusting. I'm going to have a bit of a nap now, all right?"
"Oh, don't be a weak sister!" says Adrian. "You won't last five minutes in Libya with an attitude like that. Never been to Libya, have you?"
"No," Huw says, pointedly bunching up a fold of burka into a pillow and turning his head away.
"You'll love it. Nothing like a taste of real, down-home socialism after dirty old London. People's this and Popular that and Democratic the other,
everyone off on the latest plebiscite, holding caucuses in the cafes. It's fantastic! The girls, too—fantastic, fantastic. Just talk a little politics with