"Ian Watson - Cages" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

Cages
Ian Watson

“Miss ADAMSON, I’M Svelte,” says the tall, skinny forty-something woman
who enters my office.

Svelte by name, and likewise in body, which is long and slim.
Elasticized black leggings and a black T-shirt under a crimson shirt that
sports sev-eral zipped pockets. Not quite the usual ladies’ attire for
Combined Intelligence. In my own more chunky forties, I’m in a cream
blouse and gray jacket. A long gray skirt conceals my knee-cage.

Svelte’s hair cascades blackly and the collar of her crimson shirt
gapes wide to accommodate a hexagonal neck-curse of brass, which holds
her chin high. Her impediment looks the height of funky fashion, something
chosen deliberately rather than inflicted upon her.

I indicate the brown leather chair facing my desk, and she lounges in
it.

“So what exactly is Kore?” I ask her.

According to the file still on screen, Svelte is half-Serbian,
half-Romanian. Her birth name was Svetlana but she uses the name Svelte
from her time as a... turbo-folk singer. Her job description at Combi-Intel is
Analysis Eastern Europe—she graduated in Politics and Economics from
the Uni-versity of Belgrade. Most economies in Eastern Europe are in a
mess because of the hoops coming so soon after the upheavals of uniting
with the West.

Outside my tinted window, the Thames is as gray as my clothing. At
rooftop level above Kens-ington and Chelsea, hoops hang leadenly in their
dozens. If the sun were shining on this June morn-ing, how the hoops
would glitter, like huge bangles from boutiques.

“Kore is tekky that samples and remixes the sounds of love-making,”
says Svelte.

“Hang on. Tekky. Samples. Remixes.” This Ser-bian-Romanian
seems to have a bigger English vocabulary than I do.

“Tekky is neo-techno music,” she explains. “You sample other bits of
music or noise, using a syn-thesizer to distort. Take a source sound and
make it something it never was. Kore uses fucking and coming as the
source sounds.” Helpfully she spells source. Not sauce, no.

From a crimson breast pocket emerges a memo-ry stick, which I plug
into the computer. An album cover comes on screen, depicting a dancing
woman surrounded by flames. A fox mask hides the woman’s face.
Groping, caressing hands of a multitude of hues, detached from their