"Walter Jon Williams - Voice of the Whirlwind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

buildings reflected reality, distorted it, multiplied it. Made it
interesting.
The room was perfectly soundproofed. Even the bullet railway
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Williams, Walter Jon - Voice of the Whirlwind



below the hospital failed to do more than create a minor
vibration in the room’s glass wall. Steward could watch the
world in the mirrors, but he was insulated from it, heard only
Ashraf’s emotionless voice, the whisper of the air conditioning,
the distant vibration of the bullet train. He wondered whom
Ashraf wanted him to be.
Ashraf sat behind Steward at a desk. There were readouts on
Ashraf’s side of the desk, Steward knew, connected to monitors
in the couch, voice stress analyzers, pulse and respiration
indicators, maybe even sensors for analyzing perspiration and
muscle tension. He hadn’t seen them, but sometimes when he
turned to face Ashraf he saw the reflection of red LEDs in the
doctor’s eyes.
Steward had been taught how to defeat such machines. He
remembered long hours spent under deep hypnosis, drugs,
biofeedback mechanisms. He couldn’t think of any real reason to
use his skills, so for the most part he didn’t. He used them only
when he talked about Natalie. This, he told himself, was more to
keep himself calm than to fool Ashraf.
Once he told Ashraf about his dream. “Maybe it’s a memory of
Sheol,” he said. “A parafoil assault or something.”
“You know that’s impossible,” said Dr. Ashraf. Sometimes it
seemed to Steward that he had as many personalities as there
were reflections of the world in the condecos, that he was trying
on personalities like masks in a store, one after the other, just to

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Williams, Walter Jon - Voice of the Whirlwind


see if any of them fit. It was clear that the person who dreamed
was unacceptable to Dr. Ashraf.
Steward never mentioned the dream again.



The walls of the hospital were striped with narrow bright colors
that matched the identifying colors on the bracelets of the
patients. If a patient was lost in the bustling, scrubbed corridors,
he had only to follow the minute arrows on the wall stripes.
They would lead him to his own ward, where the walls were
painted in his own color, where he was welcomed by the