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

them and they'll bend your ear until you think you're going to fall asleep, and then they'll try to bang the bourgeois out of you. In twos and threes,
if you're recalcitrant enough. I've had some fantastic nights in Libya. I can barely wait to touch down."
"Adrian, can I tell you something, in all honesty?"
"Sure, mate, sure!"
"You're a jackass. Really revolting and duller than I can imagine. If you don't get the fuck back to your own seat, I'm going to tell the monkeys
you're threatening to blow up the airship and they'll strap you into a restraint-chute and push you overboard."
"You're a bloody card, you are."
Huw gathers up his burka, stands, climbs over Adrian and moves to the back of the cabin. He selects an empty row, slides in, and stretches out.
A moment later, Adrian comes up and grabs his toe, then wiggles it.
"All right then, we'll talk later. Have a nice nap. Thanks for the sarnie!"

·····

It takes three days for the tramp freighter to bumble its way to Tripoli. It gingerly climbs to its maximum pressure height to skirt the wild and
beautiful (but radioactive and deadly) Normandy coastline, then heads south-east, to drop a cargo of incognito Glaswegian gangsters on the
outskirts of Marseilles. Then it crosses the Mediterranean coast, and spends a whole twenty-two hours doodling in broad circles around Corsica.
Huw tries to amuse himself during this latter interlude by keeping an eye open for smugglers with micro-UAVs, but even this pathetic attempt at
distraction falls flat when, after eight hours, a rigging monkey scampers into the forward passenger lounge and delivers a fifty-minute harangue
about worker's solidarity and the black gang's right to strike in flight, justifying it in language eerily familiar to anyone who—like Huw—has spent
days heroically probing the boundaries of suicidal boredom by studying the proceedings of the Third Communist International.
Having exhausted his entire stash of antique read-only books two days into a projected two-week expedition, and having found his fellow
passengers to consist of lunatics and jackasses, Huw succumbs to the inevitable. He glues his burka to a support truss in the cargo fold, dials
the eye slit to opaque, swallows a mug of valerian-laced decaff espresso, and estivates like a lungfish in the dry season.
His first warning that the airship has arrived comes when he awakens in a sticky sweat. Is the house on fire? he wonders muzzily. It feels like
someone has opened an oven door and stuck his feet in it, and the sensation is climbing his chest. There's an anxious moment, then he gets his
eye slit working again, and is promptly inundated with visual spam.
"Hello! Welcome effendi! The Thousand Nights and One Night Hotel welcomes careful westerners! We take euros, dollars, yen, and hash
(subject to assay)! For a good night out visit Ali's American Diner! Hamburgers one hundred percent Halal goat here! Need travel insurance and
ignorant of shari'a banking regulations? Let the al-Jammu Traveler's Assistance put your mind to rest with our—"
Huw instantly posts a bid for adbuster proxy services, picks the cheapest on offer, and waits patiently for his visual field to clear. After a minute
or two he can see again, except for a persistent and annoying green star in the corner of his left eye. Finally, he struggles to unglue himself and
looks about.
The passenger lounge is almost empty, a door gaping open in one side. Huw wheels his bicycle over and hops down onto the dusty concrete
apron of the former airport. It's already over thirty degrees in the shade, but once he gets out of the shadow of the blimp his burka's solar-
powered air conditioning should sort that out. The question is, where to go next? "Hmm." He rummages crossly in the pannier until he finds the
battered teapot. "Hey, you. Iffrit! Whatever you call yourself. Which way to the courtroom?"
A cartoon djinn pops into transparent life above the pot's nozzle and winks at him. "Peace be unto you, oh esteemed Madame tech-juror Rogers
Huw! If you will but bear with me for a moment—" The iffrit fizzles for a moment as it hunts for a parasitic network to colonize—"I believe you will
first wish to enter the terminal buildings and present yourself to the Revolutionary Airport Command and Cleaning Council, to present your entry
visa. Then they will direct you to a hotel where you will be accommodated in boundless paradisiacal luxury at the expense of the grateful
People's Magical Libyan Jamahiriya! (Or at least in a good VR facsimile of paradise.)"
"Uh-huh." Huw looks about. The airport is a deserted dump—literally deserted, for the anti-desertification defenses of the twentieth century, and
the greenery planted under the aegis of King Muammar the First, have faded. The Libyan national obsession with virtual landscaping (not to
mention emigration to Italy) has led to the return of the sand dunes, and the death of the gas-guzzling airline industry has left the airport with the
maintenance budget of a rural cross-country bus stop. Broken windows gape emptily from rusting tin huts; a once-outstanding airport terminal
building basks in the heat like a torpid lizard, doors open to the breeze, and even the local snack vendors don't seem to come here any more.
It takes Huw half an hour to find the Revolutionary Airport Command and Cleaning Council, a wizened-looking old woman who has her Nike-
soled feet propped up on a battered wooden desk in the lobby beneath the International Youth Hostelling sign, snoring softly through her open
mouth.
"Excuse me, but are you the government?" Huw asks politely, talking through his teapot translator. "I have come from Wales to serve on a