"Joan D. Vinge - Tin Soldier" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Joan D)

Tin Soldier
Joan D. Vinge
The ship drifted down the ragged light-robe of the Pleiades, dropped
like a perfect pearl into the midnight water of the bay. And reemerged, to
bob gently in a chain of gleaming pearls stretched across the harbor
toward the port. The port’s unsleeping Eye blinked once, the ship replied.
New Piraeus, pooled among the hills, sent tributaries of light streaming
down to the bay to welcome all comers, full of sound and brilliance and
rash promise. The crew grinned, expectant, faces peering through the
transparent hull; someone giggled nervously.



The sign at the heavy door flashed a red one-legged toy; TIN SOLDIER
flashed blue below it. EAT. DRINK. COME BACK AGAIN. In green. And
they always did, because they knew they could.
“Soldier, another round, please!” came over canned music. The owner of
the Tin Soldier, also known as Tin Soldier, glanced up from his polishing
to nod and smile, reached down to set bottles out on the bar. He mixed the
drinks himself. His face was ordinary, with eyes that were dark and
patient, and his hair was coppery barbed wire bound with a knotted cloth.
Under the curling copper, under the skin, the back of his skull was a
plastic plate. The quick fingers of the hand on the goose-necked bottle
were plastic, the smooth arm was prosthetic. Sometimes he imagined he
heard clicking as it moved. More than half his body was artificial. He
looked to be about twenty-five; he had looked the same fifty years ago.
He set the glasses on the tray and pushed, watching as it drifted across
the room, and returned to his polishing. The agate surface of the bar
showed cloudy permutations of color, grain-streak and whorl and
chalcedony depths of mist. He had discovered it in the desert to the
east—a shattered imitation tree, like a fellow traveler trapped in stasis
through time. They shared the private joke with their clientele.
“—come see our living legend!”
 He looked up, saw her coming in with the crew of the Who Got Her—
709, realized he didn’t know her. She hung back as they crowded around,
her short ashen hair like beaten metal in the blue-glass lantern light. New,
he thought. Maybe eighteen, with eyes of quicksilver very wide open. He
smiled at her as he welcomed them, and the other women pulled her up to
the agate bar. “Come on, little sister,” he heard Harkané say, “you’re one of
us too.” She smiled back at him.
“I don’t know you… but your name should be Diana, like the silver Lady
of the Moon.” His voice caught him by surprise.
Quicksilver shifted. “It’s not.”
Very new. And realizing what he’d almost done again, suddenly wanted
it more than anything. Filled with bitter joy he said, “What is your name?”
Her face flickered, but then she met his eyes and said, smiling, “My
name is Brandy.”
“Brandy…”
A knowing voice said, “Send us the usual, Soldier. Later, yes—?”
He nodded vaguely, groping for bottles under the counter ledge. Wood