"Stross, Charles & Doctorow, Cory - Jury Service" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)
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After breakfast, Huw pulls on jeans, boots, and shirt. He locks the front door carefully behind himself and tells his bicycle to unbolt itself from the rusting red drainpipe that stains the brick side of his house with green moss. He pedals uncertainly to the end of the road, then eases out into traffic, sneering as the omnipresent web of surveillance routes the peoplemovers around him.
Safe cycling is one of the modern conveniences that irritate him most. Also: polite youngsters with plastic smiles; cops who think like social workers; and geeks who think they understand technology. Geeks, the old aristocracy. He'll show them, one of these days. Huw wobbles along the side of the main road and pulls in beside the door of the Libyan consulate.
"Mister Rogers? I am pleased to meet you." The young man behind the desk has a plastic smile and is far too polite for Huw's taste: Huw grunts assent and sits down in the indicated seat. "Your application has been forwarded to us and, ah? If you would be pleased to travel to our beautiful country, I can assure you of just one week's jury service."
Huw nods again.
The polite man fidgets with the air of someone trying to come up with an inoffensive way of saying something potentially rather rude. "I'm pleased to inform you that our young land is quite tolerant of other culture's customs. I can assure you that whatever ISO-standard containment suit you choose to bring with you will be respected by our people."
Huw shakes his head. "What huh?"
"Your, that is, your-" The smiler leans across his desk and points at Huw's trefoil-marked forehead. The finger he points with meets resistance. A plastic sheet has hermetically sealed Huw's side of the room off from the rest of the consulate. It is so fantastically transparent that Huw hasn't even noticed it until the smiler's finger puckered a singularity in its vertical run, causing it to scatter light at funny angles and funhouse distort the solid and sensible wood-paneled walls behind the desk.
"Ah," Huw says. "Ah. No, you see, it's a joke of some sort. Not an official warning."
"I'm very glad to hear it, Mister Rogers! You will, of course, have documents attesting to that before you clear our immigration?"
"Right," Huw says. "Of course." Fucking Sandra. Whether or not she is directly responsible for the tat is beside the point. It happened on her prem, therefore she is culpable. Dammit. He has errands to run before he catches the flight-attracting the attention of the gene police is not on his agenda.
"Then we will see you soon." The smiler reaches into a desk drawer and pulls out a small tarnished metal teapot which he shoves experimentally at the barrier. It puckers around it and suddenly the teapot is sitting on Huw's side of the desk, wearing an iridescent soap-bubble of pinched-off containment. "Peace be with you."
"And you," says Huw, rising. The interview is obviously at an end. He picks up the teapot and follows the blinkenlights to the exit from the consulate, studiously avoiding the blurred patches of air where other visitors are screened from one another by the utility fog. "What now?" he asks the teapot.
"Blrrrt. Greetings, tech-juror Rogers. I am a guidance iffrit from the People's Magical Libyan Jamahiriya. Show me to representatives of the People's Revolutionary Command Councils and I am required to intercede for you. Polish me and I will install translation leeches in your Broca's area, then assist you in memorizing the Qur'an and hadiths. Release me and I will grant your deepest wish."
"Um, I don't think so." Huw scratches his head. Fucking Sandra, he thinks again, then he packs the pot into his pannier and pedals heavily away towards the quaint industrial-age pottery where he oversees the antique solid-volume renderers, applies the finishing human touches, and packs the finished articles for shipment. It's going to be a long working day-almost five hours-before he can get around to trying to sort this mess out, but at least the wet squishy sensation of clay under his fingernails will help calm the roiling indignation he feels at his violation by a random GM party prankster.
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Two days later, Huw's waiting with his bicycle and a large backpack on a soccer field in a valley outside Monmouth. It has rained overnight, and the field is muddy. A couple of large crows sit on the rusting goal-post, regarding him curiously. There are one or two other people slouching around the departure area dispiritedly. Airports just haven't been the same since the end of the jet age.
Huw tries to scratch the side of his nose, irritably. Fucking Sandra, he thinks again as he pokes at the opaque spidergoat silk of his biohazard burka. He'd gone round to remonstrate with her after work the other day, only to find that her house had turned into a size two thousand Timberland hiking boot and the homeowner herself had decided to winter in Fukuyama this year. A net search would probably find her but he wasn't prepared to expose himself to any more viruses this week. One was quite enough-especially after he discovered that the matching trefoil brand on his shoulder glowed in the dark.
"Attention, passengers now waiting for flight FL-052 to North Africa and stations in the Middle East, please prepare for boarding. This means 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.
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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 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."
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