"Walter Jon Williams - Hardwired" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

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Hardwired
Copyright 1986 by Walter Jon Williams


Chapter One

By midnight he knows his discontent will not let him sleep. The panzerboy drives north
from Santa Fe, over the Sangre de Cristos on the high road through Truchas, heading for Colorado,
wanting to get as close as possible to the night sky. He drives without the use of hands or feet,
his mind living in the cool neural interface that exists somewhere between the swift images that
pass before his windscreen and the electric awareness that is the alloy body and liquid crystal
heart of the Maserati. His artificial eyes, plastic and steel, stare unblinking at the road, at
twisting dirt ruts corrugated by the spring runoff, tall stands of pine and aspen, high meadows
spotted with the frozen black shapes of cattle, all outlined in the rushing, almost liquid light
of his high beams as he pushes the Maserati upward. The shapes that blaze in the headlights stand
boldly against the darkness of their, own shadows, and Cowboy can almost see himself in a
monochrome world like a black-and-white celluloid image projected before his windscreen,
flickering with the speed of his passage. It's almost like flying.
He'd thought, when he got his new Kikuyu eyes, that he'd ask for a monochrome option,
amused by the idea of flicking some mental switch in his head and being plunged into the action of
some black-and-white fantasy, an old moving picture starring the likes of Gary Cooper or Duke
Wayne, but there hadn't been much demand for monochrome and the option had been discontinued. He'd
also wanted irises of chrome steel, but the Dodger, his manager, had talked him out of that,
saying they were too conspicuous for a man in Cowboy's line of business. Cowboy agreed
reluctantly, as he always did when the Dodger came up with a new restriction on his fantasy.
Instead he'd-taken pupils of a storm-cloud gray.
But here in these mountains named after the Blood of Christ are fantasies older than any
on celluloid. They pass in montage before his steel and plastic eyes: an old whitewashed church,
the area around its doors painted like a turquoise heaven, clashing with the reds and yellows that
form a pyramid and all-seeing eye at the rounded cap of the arch; some massive white castle in the
Moroccan style, the playhouse of along-vanished Arab, its crumbling minarets streaked with brown,
its rococo iron grillwork scored with advancing rust. Suddenly around a curve a pair of pale
ghosts appear like figures of supernatural warning, Indian pilgrims dressed in white, from the
cloth binding their foreheads and braiding their long hair to the white doeskin moccasins that
wink with silver buttons. Walking patiently by moonlight, a penance, to the sanctuary at Chimayo,
there to give thanks to the carved santos or ask the Virgin for a favor. Visions like outposts of
another time, preserved here on the high rim of Earth, shimmering in the sudden brightness of
Cowboy's eyes.
Cowboy pushes the machine to the max, redlining the scales on the dashboard. Flying at
night is the thing he does best. The engine whine echoes from the trees, the hills. Wind gusts
through the open windows, bringing the sharp smell of pine. Cowboy pictures the celluloid speeding
through the projector, moving faster, images blurring. Neurons pulse their messages to the crystal
in his head, transmitting his will to the throttle, the gears, the jouncing wheels. Now the
Maserati is moving downhill, gaining speed as it races through the switchbacks, finally tearing
across the surface of the ford in front of Penasco, throwing up a wall of mist that, for a short
moment, reflects the headlights in rainbows, a hallucinatory shimmer on the edge of vision, a
foreshadowing of color here in the monochrome world.
It's dawn when the Maserati blurs across the Colorado line, and early morning by the time