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

the bronze machine enters Custer County. The mountains are brown and green now, alive with pine
and the mountain wind, the monochrome fantasy gone. Cowboy has friends here. He turns into a
private dirt road, knowing there are electronics suddenly taking an interest in him.
The road twists upward and ends at a high mountain meadow landscaped flat and crisscrossed
by the alpha of a private airstrip. Where the black deltas once flew on their occult midnight
errands, grasses and flowers now grow in the cracks of the paving. Still visible is a gouge in the
bright green aspens, where one jock overshot the strip with his wounded delta and splashed himself
and his cargo over a half mile of mountainside, but the furrow is green again with saplings. The
airfield is turning dreamlike now, a little fuzzy around the edges; but Cowboy does not intend
that the memory should ever die. There are memories that live for him as his present reality does
not, and he shines them daily, like the finish of a fine new car, to keep them bright.
For eleven generations Cowboy's ancestors farmed an area of southeastern New Mexico,
living as dots on a featureless red plain as different from the world of the Sangre de Cristos as


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is the Ukraine from Peru. Every so often one of Cowboy's family would shoulder a rifle and march
off to fight for the United States, but they concentrated most of their energies on fighting the
state of Texas. The Texans were water-hungry, consuming more than they could ever replenish,
building at the finish vast pumps just a few inches over the Texas side of the border, sucking the
alkaline New Mexico water across the line, stealing what others had so carefully preserved.
Cowboy's people fought them, holding on to what they could until the last pump rattled dry and the
dusty red earth rose on the wind and turned the world into a sandblasting hurricane.
Cowboy remembers his days in the dust bowl, living at his uncle's ranch after his father
broke himself trying to hang on. Existing inside a gray assortment of bleached planks on the edge
of the desert the Texans had made a place where red earth drifted inches deep behind the door
whenever the wind blew, and days passed without seeing the sun as anything brighter than a ruddy
warm vagueness behind the scouring sand. Farming was impossible, and the family ran cattle
instead, an occupation only slightly less precarious. The nearest town bragged about the number of
churches it had and Cowboy was raised in one of them, watching the congregation grow bleaker week
by week, their skin turning gray, their eyes ever more desperate as they asked the Lord to forgive
whatever sin had led them to this cleansing. Texans, once the enemy, wandered through on their way
to somewhere else, living in cardboard boxes, in old automobiles that sat on blocks and had long
ago lost their paint to the sand. The Rock War came and went, and things got harder. Hymns
continued to be sung, liquor and cards foresworn, and notices of farm auctions continued to be
posted at the courthouse.
The Dodger was an older man who had moved to Colorado. When he came home he drove a shiny
automobile, and he didn't go to church. He chewed tobacco because chewing didn't interfere with
his picking when, in his free time, he played left-handed mandolin with a jug band. The gray
people in the church didn't like to talk about how he'd made his money. And one day the Dodger saw
Cowboy riding in a rodeo.
The Dodger visited Uncle's ranch and arranged to borrow Cowboy for a while, even paid for
his time. He got Cowboy some practice time on a flight simulator and then made a call to a
thirdman he knew. The rest, as the Dodger would say, is history.
Cowboy was sixteen when he took up flying. In his cracked old leather boots he already
stood three inches over six feet, and soon he stood miles taller, an atmosphere jock who spread
his contrails from one coast to the other, delivering the mail, mail being whatever it was that
came his way. The Orbitals and the customs people in the Midwest were just another kind of Texan-