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

"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 technology jury. Can you direct me to the public transport terminus?"
"I wouldn't bother if I were you," someone says from behind him, making Huw jump so high he almost punches a hole in the yellowing ceiling tiles. "She's moonlighting, driving a Thai investment bank's security bots on the evening shift. See the bandwidth?"
"Um, no, as a matter of fact I don't," Huw says defensively. "I stick to the visible spectrum."
The interloper is probably female and from somewhere in northern Europe, judging by the way she's smeared zinc ointment across her entire observable epidermis. Chilly fog spills from her cuffs at wrist and ankle and there's the whine of a peltier cooler pushed to the limit coming from her bum-bag. About all Huw can see of her is her eyes and an electric blue ponytail erupting from the back of her anti-melanoma hood.
"Isn't it a bit rude to snoop on someone else's dreams?" he adds.
"Not really." The interloper shrugs, then grins alarmingly at him. "It's what I do for a living." She offers him a hand, and before he can stop himself he's shaking it politely. "I'm Bjцrk. Doctor Bjцrk."
"Bjцrk, uh-"
"I know what you're going to say, named after the early twenty-first century bard, yes. I specialize in musical dream therapy. And I'm here on a tech jury gig, too. Perhaps we'll get a chance to work on the same case?"
At that moment the Revolutionary Airport Command and Cleaning Council coughs, spasms painfully, sits up, and looks around querulously. I'm not working! Honest! She exclaims through the medium of Huw's teapot translator. Then, getting a grip: "Oh, you're tourists. Can I help you?"
Her manner is so abrupt and rude that Huw feels right at home. "Yes, yes," he declares impatiently. "We're jurors and we need to get to a hotel. Where's the light rail terminal or bus stand?"
"Are no busses. Today is Friday, can't you read?"
"Friday-" Huw does a double-take.
"Yes, but how are we to our hotel to ride?" asks Doctor Bjцrk, sounding puzzled.
"Why don't you walk?" the Council asks with gloomy satisfaction. "Haven't you got legs? Didn't Allah, the merciful, bless you with a full complement of homeobox genes?"
"But it's-" Huw consults his wrist-map and does a double-take-"twelve kilometers! And it's forty-three degrees in the shade!"
"It's Friday," the old woman repeats placidly. "Nothing works on Fridays. It's in the Qur'an."
"So why are you working for a Burmese banking cartel as a security bot supervisor?" Bjцrk asks sharply.
"That's-!" the Council glares at her. "That's none of your business!"
"Burma isn't an Islamic country," Huw muses aloud, seeing which direction Bjцrk is heading in. Maybe she's not a fucknozzle after all, he thinks to himself, although he has his doubts about anyone who has anything to do with dream therapy, much less musical dream therapy. (Unless she's only in it for purely practical reasons, such as money.) "Do you suppose they might be dealing with their demographic deficit by importing out-of-timezone gastarbeiters from Islamic countries who want to work on the day of rest?"
"What an astonishing thought!" echoes Bjцrk. "That must be illegal, mustn't it?"
"Stop! Stop!" The Revolutionary Airport Command and Cleaning Council puts her hands up in the air. "I have a nephew, he has a car! Perhaps he can give you a ride on his way to mosque? I'm sure he must be going there in only half an hour, and I'm sure your hotel will turn out to be on his way."
The car, when it arrives, is a gigantic early twenty-first century Mercedes diesel, with tinted windows and air conditioning and plastic seats that have cracked and split in the dry desert heat. A brilliantly detailed green-and-silver miniature mosque conceals a packet of tissues on the rear parcel shelf and the dash is plastered with green and gold stickers bearing edifying quotations from the hadiths. The Council's nephew looks too young to bear the weight of his huge black moustache, let alone to be driving this Teutonic behemoth, but at least he's awake and moving in the noonday furnace-heat.
"Hotel Marriott," Bjцrk says. "Vite-schnell-pronto! ЎHale, hale!"
The Mercedes crawls along the highway like a dung beetle on the lowest step of a pyramid. As they head towards the outskirts of the mostly-closed city of Tripoli Huw feels the gigantic and oppressive weight of advertising bearing down on his proxy filters. When Libya got serious about consumerism in the second decade of millennium three, they went overboard on superficial glitz and cheezy sloganizing. The deluge of CoolTown webfitti they're driving through alternates between insanely dense technobabble and a bizarrely arabized version of discreet Victorian trader's notices, with just a seasoning of old-time anti-western paranoia. Once they drive under the threshold of the gigantic tinted geodesic dome that hovers above the city, lifted on its own column of hot air, it finally gets through to Huw: he's not in Monmouth any more, or even Bradford.
The Council's nephew narrates a shouted, heavily accented travelogue as they hoot and lurch through the traffic, but most of it is lost in the roar of the air-conditioner and the whine of the differential. What little Huw can make out seems to be pitches for local businesses-cafes, hash-bars, amusement parlors. Doctor Bjцrk and Huw sit awkwardly at opposite sides of the Merc's rear bench, conversation an impossibility at the current decibel level.
Doctor Bjцrk fishes in her old-fashioned bum-bag and produces a stylus and a scrap of scribable material, scribbles a moment and passes it over: DINNER PLANS?
Huw shook his head. Dinner-ugh. He's gamy and crusty with dried sweat under his burka and can't imagine eating, but he supposes he'd better put some fuel in the boiler before he sleeps.
Bjцrk scrolls her message off the material, then scribbles again: I KNOW A PLACE. LOBBY@18H?
Huw nods, suppressing a wince. Bjцrk smiles at him, looking impossibly healthy and scrubbed underneath her zinc armor.