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

afterimage of the burning horizon, the sky that was a deeper
darkness than that surrounding his bed.
In the room on the other side were a married couple, the
Thornbergs. They’d made a lot of money in their lives and had
invested in a couple of young bodies. They spent most of their
nights making love. They seemed nice, but their conversation

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Williams, Walter Jon - Voice of the Whirlwind


was all about investments, windows of opportunity, sports like
squash and golf. Steward knew jack about investments, and the
only sports he cared about were the ones he could bet on—
racing, jai alai, the Australian firefight football that, back in a
former life, he could pick up, about two in the morning, from the
pirate satellites. The Thornbergs lived in some kind of
Presbyterian condecology in California that forbade things like
pirate satellite receptors, betting sports, news programs from the
wrong side of the world, pornography. Their bodies were young,
their minds elderly. Steward simply had nothing to say to these
people.
A lot of the people in the Psychology wing were like the
Thornbergs. It didn’t seem to Steward that this was one of the
personalities he would ever succeed in adopting. He wondered if
Ashraf wanted him to try it on.



“Have you ever wondered why they chose you?” Dr. Ashraf
asked.
“I fit their profile,” said Steward.
“But do you know what Coherent Light was after?” Ashraf
persisted. “There were a lot of people trying to get in. Out of all
those, they picked you. Educated you, fed you, housed you,
trained you. You and the other Icehawks cost them a lot more
than their normal run of employee. Didn’t you ever wonder

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Williams, Walter Jon - Voice of the Whirlwind


why?”
“They wanted me. That was good enough.”
“You didn’t feel any loyalty to the Canards,” Ashraf said. “Not
to their purposes or their territory.”
“That wasn’t the Canard ethic. The Canards were conscious
anarchists, deliberately amoral. Their game was selling stuff.
They didn’t care to whom.”
“You knew you didn’t want to do that.”