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

Adrian pats his shoulder. "Pecker up. It's all for the best."
The box opens and the Kleinmonster bobs a curtsey at him, then warbles. His throat warbles in response. The hash has loosened his vocal cords so that there isn't the same sense of forced labor, just a mellow, easy kind of song. His voices and the Kleinmonster's intertwine in an aural handshake and gradually his sensoria fades away, until he's no longer looking out of his eyes, no longer feeling through his skin, but rather he's part of the Cloudmind, smeared across space and time and a billion identities all commingled and a-swirl with unknowable convection currents of thought and deed.
Somewhere there is the Earth, the meatspace whence the Cloudmind has ascended. His point of view inverts and now the Earth is enveloped in him, a messy gobstopper dissolving in a probabilistic mindmouth. It's like looking down at a hatched-out egg, knowing that once upon a time you fit inside that shell, but now you're well shut of it. Meat, meat, meat. Imperfect and ephemeral and needlessly baroque and kludgey, but it calls to the Cloud with a gravatic tug of racial memory.
And then the sensoria recedes and he's eased back into his skin, singing to the Kleinmonster and its uplink to the Cloud. He knows he's x-mitting his own sensoria, the meat and the unreasoning demands of dopamine and endorphin. Ah, says the Ambassador. Ah. Yes. This is what it was like. Ah.
Awful.
Terrible.
Ah.
Well, that's done.
The Kleinmonster uncoils and stretches straight up to the ceiling, then gradually telescopes back into itself until it's just a button of faintly buzzing nanocrud. The buzzing gains down and then vanishes, and it falls still.
Bonnie shakes his shoulders. "What happened?" she says, eyes shining.
"Got what it needed," Huw says, with a barely noticeable under-drone.
"What?"
"What? Oh, a bit of a reminder, I expect. A taste of the meat."
"That's it?" Bonnie says. "All that for—what? A trip down memory lane? All that fucking work and it doesn't even want to stick around and chat?"
Huw shrugs. "That's the Cloud for you. In-fucking-effable."
"Will it be back? I wanted to talk to it about …" she trailed off, blushing. "I wanted to know what it was like."
Huw thinks of what it was like to be part of the matrioshke-brain, tries to put it into words. "I can't quite describe it," he says. "Not in so many words. Not right now. Give me a while, maybe I'll manage it." He's got a nasty case of the pasties and he guzzles a cup of lukewarm milky tea, swirling it around his starchy tongue. "Of course, if you're really curious, you could always join up."
Bonnie looks away and Adrian huffs a snort. "I'll do it some day," she says. "Just want to know what I'm getting into."
Huw keeps the smile off his phiz. "I understand," he says. "Don't worry, I still think you're an anti-human race-traitor, girlie. You don't need to prove anything to me."
"Fucking right I don't!" Bonnie says. She's blushing rather fetchingly.
"Right," Huw says.
"Right."
Huw begins to hum a little, experimenting with his new transhuman peripheral. The drone is quite nice. He sings a little of the song from the courthouse, in two-part discord. Bonnie's flush deepens and she rubs her palms against her thighs, hissing like a teakettle.
Huw cocks his head at her and leans forward a bit, and she grabs his ears and drags him down on top of her.
Adrian taps him on the shoulder a moment later. "Sorry to interrupt," he says, "but Judge Rosa's bound to come looking for you eventually. We'd best get you out of Libya sharpish."
Huw ignores him, concentrating on the marimba sensation of Bonnie's ribcage grinding over his chest.
Adrian shakes his head. "I'll just go steal a blimp or something, then, shall I?"
Bonnie breaks off worrying Huw's ear with her tongue and teeth and says, "Fuck off a while, will you, Adrian?"
Adrian contemplates the two of them for a moment, trying to decide whether they need a good kick 'round the kidneys, then turns on his heel and goes off to find Maizie, or perhaps Beckie, and sort out an escape.
The Cloud whirls in its orbit, tasting the meat with its multifarious sensory apparati, thinking its in-fucking-effable thoughts, muttering in RF and gravity and eigenstate. The ambassador hibernates on the safe-house's floor, prized loose from under Huw's tailbone, where it had been digging rather uncomfortably, quite spoiling Huw's concentration, and tossed idly into a corner. The Cloud's done with it for now, but its duty-cycle is hardly exhausted, and it wonders what its next use will be.
Huw moans an eerie buzz that sets Bonnie's gut a-quiver in sympathy, which is not nearly as unpleasant as it sounds.
In fact, Bonnie thinks she could rather get used to it.
The End
© 2002 by Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow and SCIFI.COM.