"Walter Jon Williams - Send Them Flowers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

Besides, freaky Probability was fizzing in our veins. Our metabolisms were
pumped by a shift in the electromagnetic fine structure constant. Oxygen was
captured and transported and burned and united with carbon and exhaled with
greater efficiency. We didn’t have to breathe as often as in our home Probability,
and still our bodies ran a continuous fever from the boost in our metabolic rate.

Another few more steps into Probability and the multiverse would start
fucking with the strong and weak nuclear forces, causing our bodies to fly apart or
the calcium in our bones to turn radioactive. But here, we remained more or less
ourselves even as certain chemical reactions became much easier.

Which was why Socorro and its Topside had been built on this strange
outpost of the multiverse, to create alloys that weren’t possible in our home
probabilities, and to refine pure chemicals in industrial-sized quantities at a fraction
of the energy it would have taken elsewhere.

Probability specialists in the employ of the Pryor corporate gene line had
labored hard to locate this particular Probability, with its unique physical
properties—some theorists would argue, in fact, that they’d created it, like
magicians bringing an entire universe into being with their spell. Once the Pryors had
found the place, they’d explored it for years while putting together the right industrial
base to properly exploit it. When they finally came, they came in strength, a whole
industrial colony jigsawing itself into the Socorro system practically overnight.

Once they started shipping product out, they had to declare to the au-thorities
where it came from, and this particular Probability was no longer secret. Others
could come and exploit it, but the Pryors already had their facilities in place, and the
profits pouring out.

Nobody lived in Socorro permanently. There was something about this reality
that was conducive to forming tumors. You came in on a three-year contract and
then shipped out, with cancer-preventing chemicals saturating your tissues.

“Oh yisss,” Tonio said as we walked down Topside’s main avenue.
“Scru-tinize the fine ladies yonder, my compeer. I desire nothing so much as to
bond with them chemically, oh yisss.”

The local fashion for women was weirdly modest and demure, cover-ing the
whole body and with a hood for the head, and the outfit looked inflated—as if they
were wearing full-body life preservers, designed to keep them floating even if
Topside fell out of orbit and dropped into the ocean.

But even these outfits couldn’t entirely disguise the female form, or the female
walk. My blood seemed to fizz at the sight, and perhaps, in this quirky Probability, it
did.

Music floated out of a place called the Flesh Pit, all suggestive dark win-dows
and colorful electric ads for cheap drinks. “Let us sample the pleasures of this
charming bistro,” Tonio suggested.