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

IF MY PARTNER'S REALLY EXCITED OR IF I'M JUST ON A SILICON AIDE...
-Kikuyu Optics I.G., A Division Of Mikoyan-Gurevich

She first met Cunningham in another bar, the Blue Silk. Sarah ran Weasel as per contract,
but the snagboy, a runner who had got more greedy than he had the smarts to handle, had been
altered himself-she was nursing bruises. She recovered the goods, fortunately, and since the
contract was with the thirdmen, she had been paid in endorphins, handy since she needed a few of
them herself.
There is a bone bruise on the back of her thigh and she can't sit; instead, she leans back
against the padded bar and sips her rum and lime. The Blue Silk's audio system plays island music
and soothes her played-up nerves.
The Blue Silk is run by an ex-cutterjock named Maurice, a West Indian with the old-model
Zeiss eyes who was on the losing side in the Rock War. He's got chip sockets on his ankles and
wrists, the way the military wore them then. There are pictures of his friends and heroes on the
walls, all of them with the azure silk neck scarves of the elite space defense corps, most of them
framed with black mourning ribbons turning purple with the long years.
Sarah wonders what he has seen with those eyes. Did it include the burst of X rays that
preceded the 10,000-ton rocks, launched from the orbital mass drivers, that tore through the
atmosphere to crash on Earth's cities? The artificial meteors, each with the force of a nuclear
blast, had first fallen in the eastern hemisphere, over Mombasa and Calcutta, and by the time the
planet had rotated and made the western hemisphere a target, the Earth had surrendered-but the
Orbital blocs felt they hadn't made their point forcefully enough in the West, and so the rocks
fell anyway. Communications foul-up, they said. Earth's billions knew better.
Sarah was ten. She was doing a tour in a Youth Reclamation Camp near Stone Mountain when
three rocks obliterated Atlanta and killed her mother. Daud, who was eight, was trapped in the
rubble, but the neighbors heard his screams and got him out. After that, Sarah and her brother
bounced from one DP agency to another, then ended up in Tampa with her father, whom she hadn't
seen or heard of since she was three. The social worker held her hand all the way up the decaying
apartment stairs, and Sarah held Daud's. The halls stank of urine, and a dismembered doll lay
strewn on the second-floor landing, broken apart like the nations of Earth, like the lives of the
people here. When the apartment door opened she saw a man in a torn shirt with sweat stains in the
armpits and watery alcoholic eyes. The eyes, uncomprehending, had moved from Sarah and Daud and
then to the social worker as the papers were served, and the social worker said, "This is your
father. He'll take care of you," before dropping Sarah's hand. It turned out to be only half a
lie.
She looks at the fading photographs in their dusty frames, the dead men and women with
their metallic Zeiss eyes. Maurice is looking at them, too. He is lost in his memories, and it
looks as if he is trying to cry; but his eyes are lubricated with silicon and his tear ducts are
gone, of course, along with his dreams, with the dreams of the five billion people who had hoped
the Orbitals would improve their lives, who have no hope now but to get out somehow, out into the
cold, perfect cobalt of the sky.
Sarah wishes she herself could cry, for the dead hope framed in black on the walls, for
herself and Daud, for the broken thing that is all earthly aspiration, even for the snagboy who
had seen his chance to escape but had not been smart enough to play his way out of the game his


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hopes had dealt him into. But the tears are long gone and in their place is hardened steel desire-