"Stross, Charles - Ancient Of Days" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)
Eric entered the bathroom as she was rinsing conditioner out of her hair. He sat down on the closed lid of the lavatory and carefully shut his book before he turned to face her. "What is it?" asked Sue, switching off the shower attachment. Unlike Eric, she didn't read many books when she was home; only people.
He looked at her and smiled. "Just wondering what it was all about this evening. Was it really Family business?"
It was characteristic of Eric, an ill-timed curiosity that pried into hidden corners just when she most wanted to leave them alone. She'd become used to it in the eight months they'd lived together, and expected it to drive them apart over the next few years. This relationship was an anomaly, after all; neither of them were mature by the standards of their people, who were traditionally promiscuous, and their intimacy was more a consequence of their isolation than of any convergence between them. "No," she said, and then, on second thoughts: "I'm not sure. The man they sent – he said he was called Kristoph, but I don't believe him. He's some kind of spook, can pick locks and knows how to burgle an office and make it look like someone else's fault. He was hunting for something in the HGP contract notes but I think he didn't know quite what he'd been sent to get." She sank back in the bath and shivered, then reached out to run some more hot water into the tub. "He was really creepy, you know? And the stuff he was spouting –"
Eric put his book down on the window ledge, carefully avoiding the patch of condensation that trickled down one corner. He always seemed to be carrying a book around the house with him, but never seemed to read from it; she had speculated whimsically that he made himself invisible when he was reading, as a defence against being disturbed. "Where was this Kristoph from? Who sent him?" He leaned forward and picked up the conditioner bottle and began turning it in his hands, inspecting it as if he expected t o discover a hidden message embedded in its soft pink plastic.
"I don't know who sent him, but I expect it was some hard-line oldster shit. He kept referring to the dark: you should have heard him going on! 'Take care, sorceress, lest they send for the witch-finder general and burn thee at the stake!'" Her voice deepened an octave and her cheeks sagged into nascent jowls as she delivered the injunction to a wisp of steam that hovered over the shower fitting. "They're still living in the prehistoric past, Eric, not the new age crap the humans keep spouting on a bout but the real thing –" she yanked the plug out angrily.
Eric watched in silence as she sat up and let the water drain around her. She saw him eyeing her breasts as they sagged slightly, no longer buoyed up by the fluid around her. "Any thoughts on the matter?" she asked, trying to conceal her anxiety. "Come on, don't just sit there!"
Eric passed her a towel. "Thanks," she said, standing up and wrapping it around herself. The air on her skin felt cold even though the room was half-filled with steam.
"I think we ought to investigate this carefully," he said. There were times when she hated his imperturbability; just this once it was a shred of comfort. "It sounds like the kind of intrigue that could affect us if we ignore it – the dinosaurs still have fangs."
"Huh." She shook her head and stepped out of the tub. "Will you stop speaking in tongues and give me a straight answer for once?" She reached out and gently cupped his cheek in her hand. "What's worrying you, love? All the old stories coming back to haunt you?"
"No, it's not that." He stood up, accidentally dislodging her hand in the process. "It's just a nagging feeling I've got." His face hardened slightly, so that the soft, pampered look of the mathematics professor was eclipsed for an instant by some harsher, more primal expression of his identity. "Maybe we should look into precisely what the HGP group are working on for their industrial grant. I doubt that the Ancients would be interested if it was harmless to us. But there might be something we can spot which your spook wasn't educated to identify. Something that will put the program in an entirely different perspective."
***
Helena, assistant to Ancient of Days, nevertheless didn't live in the tunnels alongside with her mistress; she had a daylight identity and a job that payed the bills the night-blind humans levied in return for warmth and peace among them. After the meeting broke up she found herself inviting Kristoph back to her house: she deliberately refrained from exploring her motives. Kristoph, for reasons of his own, accepted the invitation.
Perhaps it was the remembered chill of the news that Ancient of Days had borne, or perhaps the central heating was malfunctioning; in either case, the hall was cold as she took off her coat and hung it behind the door. "Something to drink, perhaps?" she asked as he patiently scraped his boots on the doormat. "Or some coffee?"
"A drink would be great." Kristoph unbuttoned his coat and hesitated a moment before hanging it on the door. She heard him test the Yale lock before he turned and followed her into the living room. "You live here alone?"
She shrugged and bent down over the sideboard. The stereo was still switched on and the room filled with the faint strains of Vivaldi. Two tumblers of scotch appeared, followed by ice from a small refrigerator. "I like to keep the world at a distance," she said, turning to pass him one of the glasses. "I'm no lonelier than I want to be."
"And how lonely is that?"
"You're here. There've been others, but none of them cared to compete for my attention with Her."
"Ah." Kristoph sat down at one side of the sofa, then glanced at her enquiringly. She took a mouthful of burning spirit in order to cover her indecision, then quickly sat down next to him.
Presently Kristoph asked, "Did you choose to serve Her, or did she choose you?" He stared into his glass and swirled the thin layer of liquid around until the bottom was exposed. "I mean, I wasn't aware that She has any tradition of priestly attendance ..."
"She doesn't. And to answer your question, I didn't choose to serve her, and she didn't choose me. It just happened." Helena stared at his glass for a moment in fascination. "Are you going to drink that?" she asked.
"Eventually. I'm sorry, it's just a bad habit of mine. One of my acquaintances said I was like a cat; I play with my food. I can't remember when that was, but it was some years ago." He glanced up and stared moodily at the window-sill. "I try to cultivate my private eccentricities. They're a kind of defense, if you will, against this modern habit of living in crowds. It strikes me that the bigger the city you live in, the more anonymous you become. It's as if it's an infectious disease, and the most common side-effect is loneliness."
"Perhaps you're right." She rubbed her cheek reflectively. "I certainly don't know of many other – people – living in this man-swarm. Perhaps that's why She asked me to help her. She needs eyes and ears among the humans, you know. They used to be easy to deceive, but now their intelligence is as good as or better than anything we have –"
"It lends a certain tension to life, doesn't it. There have been times when I've gone months without seeing another weerde face. I felt like I was going crazy: you know, like that patient of Freud's ..." she turned and stared at him intently.
"Steppenwolf. Yes, I knew him well." Kristoph tossed back what was left of his glass and stared back at her. "It's late, Helena. Would you mind if I stayed the night?"
"That's why I invited you here," she said, her face tingling with anticipation. "It's very cold outside, even though the war's over. Can you think of anywhere you'd rather be?" Kristoph was of a certain age, as was she, and if he didn't understand what it was like to be single and unmated at fifty years of age, there was time for plenty more opportunities ahead.
"I can't," he said, a strange roughness edging into his voice. "I've been searching for a long time now –" He glanced away, suddenly shy. "I don't know you, but I feel as if I've known you for years," he tried to explain.
"In the morning you must tell me where you've spent your life," she said. "Then maybe we can think about the future." They stood up simultaneously and came together in an endless, clinging embrace. "But first –" she kissed him. Gradually, her face relaxed into its primal form, her cheeks flowing and her teeth expanding to grate against his lengthening jaw as she felt something vital return to her. A flame of desire that had been bottled up behind an alien mask for too long had finally discovered its own identity: and by the time the two lovers raked the clothes from each other's backs, an onlooker would have seen nothing human about them. But that was as it should be, for neither Helena nor Kristoph were – or ever had been – human.
***
Two days after the raid: and, astonishingly, nobody had noticed Kristoph's carefully laid trail of clumsy clues. In fact, none of the staff so much as noticed the unlocked file cabinet or the opened door. It might as well have been a non-event. Sue, who had been steeling herself for vans with swirling blue lights in the rainy night and a plastic tape cordon around the premises, didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Instead, she took the first afternoon off with a well-rehearsed migraine and followed it up the next morning with a headache. Nothing too serious, though. Working in a lab with biohazard stickers on the door meant that any serious symptoms could land her in an isolation ward, exposed to risks of examination that she was not prepared to run.
Eric worked on the other side of the campus, in a cramped office in the department of Mathematics and Computer Science. How he'd ever got into academia still mystified her; a knack for passing exams, he used to say, smiling faintly when she probed for an explanation. Nobody took any notice when she stopped by his office on her way in to work that afternoon, looking pale and a trifle nauseated. A lecturer carrying on with a post-grad was nobody's business but their own, after all, and stranger things had b een known to go on in university staff rooms.
"Up to a rummage tonight?" Sue asked, sitting in his favourite visitor's chair and idly stirring the papers on his desk. "We could go on to a restaurant afterwards –"
Eric pulled open a desk drawer and withdrew a black plastic case. "No trouble at all," he said. "You think it'll be safe?"
"Sure," she said. "I swallowed enough of the buzz-words to ask the right questions. We'll say it's about a grant extension to your department and we've got to dig the right names out to put on the letter. How's that?"
"I've been doing a bit of reading around the subject," he said, gesturing at a fat book balanced on one end of the desk. "Developmental genetics?"
"Figure a mathematical slant on it," she said, shrugging. "Otherwise, be yourself."
"Hah. Okay. We'll leave the copying for some other time. But for now, are you sure you can remember just which drawer it was that your visitor took a particular interest in?"
"Pretty much so, yes. He was after HGP-funded stuff, specifically anything to do with Geiger-DESY Research and a doctor MacLuhan. He didn't seem to know what, but he photocopied everything in sight and shoved it in a briefcase. I couldn't tell you what the notorious doctor was up to, though; I've never heard of him, he seems to be some kind of industrial connection ..."
"Hah. Thicker and thicker, my dear Watson." He sat up and spun his chair round to face away from the desk. "How are Geiger-DESY connected with the Department?"
Sue thought for a moment. "If it's anything like the way industrial funding goes elsewhere in the field, it's a simple directed research project. In return for a first shot at information from the Homoeobox Research Team Geiger-DESY pays a huge whack and provides equipment. The University pays for the staff and gets the kudos while the company get the patent rights. How's that sound?"
"And what line are Geiger-DESY in?" asked Eric, thoughtfully. "I thought they were into drugs –"
"There's not much difference these days, I mean, the times when they used to go out in pith helmets and poke around the jungle in search of some new wonder plant are all but dead, aren't they? It's all molecular modelling and receptor-affinity analysis. As often as not they start out with a complete biochemical description of a problem and work backwards towards isolating a genetic –" she stopped, realising that she'd lost Eric a while back. "Well," she concluded, "it's no surprise that Geiger-DESY are into the human genome project. That's where everyone's expecting the next big therapeutic breakthroughs to come from."
"Like a cure for AIDS?" asked Eric.
"That, and other things," she acknowledged. "When the Human Genome Project is complete, they'll have a total map of the human genetic structure. They'll be able to play with it, working out what causes what and how it acts as a, not a blueprint so much as a, program for generating human beings. If you insert a bug in the software you get a malfunction – AIDS is a bug in the immune system, spliced into the program by viral reverse transcriptase – but, equally, if you've got a faulty computer program you tackle the problem by trying to debug it, not by hitting it over the head with a blunt instrument like a drug."
"I think I see," said Eric. "One other question, though. What's a Homoeobox when it's at home, and why's everybody so interested in it?"
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