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

to enlist?” he asked.
“D’accord,” said Steward.



Steward was weak when he came awake for the first time. There
was a machine that breathed for him and a tube down his throat.
He missed things: the implants, the socket he’d had at the base
of his skull to take the cyber interface. His mind held memories
of reflexes that he couldn’t match, strength that had somehow
ebbed away while he wasn’t looking. He spent hours each day
brutalizing himself beneath weights, running on the hospital’s
treadmills, stretching the tender muscles in his legs, arms,
shoulders. He practiced the martial arts, too, in a lonely corner of
the physical therapy area, throwing punches, kicks, and
combinations over and over again in cold, purposeful, sweaty
repetition. Men and women recovering from surgery, or old
people taking their first few trembling steps in new young
bodies, turned their eyes away from him, from the grim savagery
with which he was assaulting the air, his memories, himself.
The exercises filled the long hours, built muscle, honed reflex.
They kept his mind occupied with immediate sensation, which
was what he wanted. He had too much idle time. He didn’t want
to dwell on memories.
Over and over again, in his corner, he went through the motions

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...%20Williams%20-%20Voice%20of%20the%20Whirlwind.html (6 of 423)23-2-2006 20:24:56
Williams, Walter Jon - Voice of the Whirlwind


of crushing bone, gouging eyes, snapping spines.
As yet, he didn’t know whose.



In the room next to Steward’s was a man named Corso, who
lived with a crazed secondhand load of guilt and paranoia,
having come awake and discovered that all his worst fears had
come true, that his Alpha personality’s whole world had come
apart like a broken mirror, and that he’d tortured himself for
months with the shards before he finally threw himself off a
bridge. And, now that he was back, it wasn’t over; all he could
see in front of him was the yawning horror, the nightmare going
on and on...
The doctors were trying to soften Corso’s world with
medication, turn it warm and pleasant again until his therapy
began to make a difference, but Corso still woke Steward every
night with his moans, his screams. They rang out from the
darkness as Steward lay in his bed staring into the soft-edged
curtains of gauzy darkness, seeing in his mind’s eye the fading