"Williams,.Walter.Jon.-.Hardwired" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)
Warren is reassembling parts of the pump, ready to run his tests, and will be busy for a while. Cowboy leaves the pool of light and walks into the blackness of the hangar. The deltas loom above him, poised and ready, lacking only a pilot to make them living things. His hands reach up to touch a smooth underbelly, an epoxide canard, the fairing of a downward-gazing radar. Like stroking a matte-black animal, a half-wild thing too dangerous to be called a pet. It lacks only a pilot, and a purpose.
He moves a ladder from an engine access panel to a cockpit and climbs into the seat that was, years ago, molded to his body. The familiar metal and rubber smells warm up to him. He closes his eyes and remembers the night splattered with brightness, the sudden flare of erupting fuel, the mad chase as, supersonic, he bobbed and weaved among the hills and valleys of the Ozarks, the laws on his tail, burning for home...
His first delta was called Midnight Sun, but he changed the name after he'd figured out what was really going on. He and the other deltajocks were not an abstract response to market conditions but a continuation of some kind of mythology. Delivering the mail across the high dome of night, despite all the oppressors' efforts to the contrary. Keeping a light burning in the darkness, hope in the shape of an afterburner flame. The last free Americans, on the last high road...
So he'd begun to live what he suddenly knew. Accepting the half-scornful, condescending nickname they'd given him, living it, becoming Cowboy, the airjock. Answering to nothing else. Becoming the best, living in realms higher than any of the competition. He called his next delta Pony Express. And in it he delivered the mail as long as they'd let him.
Till times changed, and modes of delivery changed. Till he had to become a boy instead of a jock. The eyes that could focus into the night blackness, straining to spot the infrared signature of the laws riding combat air patrol over the prairie, were now shut in a small armored cabin, all the visuals coming in through remotes. He is still the best, still delivering the mail.
He shifts in his seat. The country swing fades and all Cowboy can hear in the echoing silence is the whirr of Warren's lathe. And sense the restlessness in himself, wanting only-a name...
Chapter Two
TODAY/YES
Bodies and parts of bodies flare and die in laserlight, here the translucent sheen of eyes rimmed in kohl or turned up to a heaven masked by the starry-glitter ceiling, here electric hair flaring with fashionable static discharges, here a blue-white glow of teeth rimmed in darkglow fire and pierced by mute extended tongue. It is zonedance. Though the band is loud and sweat-hot, many of the zoned are tuned to their own music through crystal wired delicately to the auditory nerves, or dancing to the headsets through which they can pick up any of the bar's twelve channels... They seethe in arrhythmic patterns, heedless of one another. Perfect control is sought, but there are accidents-impacts, a flurry of fists and elbows-and someone crawls out of the zone, whimpering through a bloodstreaked hand, unnoticed by the pack.
To Sarah the dancers at the Aujourd'Oui seem a twitching mass of dying flesh, bloody, insensate, mortal. Bound by the mud of earth. They are meat. She is hunting, and Weasel is the name of her friend.
MODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERN
Need a Modern Body?
All Electric-Replaceable-In the Mode!
Get One Now!
NBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODY
The body designer had eyes of glittering violet above cheekbones of sculptured ivory. Her hair was a streaky blond that swept to an architecturally perfect dorsal fin behind her nape. Her muscles were catlike and her mouth was a cruel flower.
"Hair shorter, yes," she said. "One doesn't wear it long in freefall. " Her fingers lashed out and seized Sarah by the chin, tilting her head to the cold north light. Her fingernails were violet, to match her eyes, and sharp. Sarah glared at her, sullen. The body designer smiled. "A little pad in the chin, yes," she says. "You need a stronger chin. The tip of the nose can be altered; you're a bit too retrousse. The curve of the jawbone needs a little flattening-I'll bring my paring knife tomorrow. And, of course, we'll remove the scars. Those scars have got to go." Sarah curled her lip under the pressure of the violet-tipped fingers.
The designer dropped Sarah's chin and whirled. "Must we use this girl, Cunningham?" she asked. "She has no style at all. She can't walk gracefully. Her body's too big, too awkward. She's nothing. She's dirt. Common."
Sarah did not reply. Instead, she looked up at the body designer, drawing back her lips, showing teeth. "Let me hunt you some night, Firebud," she said. "I'll show you style."
The designer rolled her eyes. "Dirtgirl stuff," she snorted, but she took a step back. Sarah grinned.
"And, Firebud," Cunningham said, "leave the scars alone. They will speak to our Princess. Of this cruel terrestrial reality that she helped create. That she dominates. With which she is already half in love.
"Yes," he said, "leave the scars alone." For the first time he smiled, a brief tightening of the cheek muscles, cold as liquid nitrogen. "Our Princess will love the scars," he said. "Love them till the very last."
WINNERS/YES LOSERS/YES
The Aujourd'Oui is a jockey bar, and they are all here, moonjocks and rigjocks, holdjocks and powerjocks and rockjocks-the jocks condescending to share the floor with the mudboys and dirtgirls who surround them, those who hope to become them or love them or want simply to be near them, to touch them in the zonedance and absorb a piece of their radiance. The jocks wear their colors, vests, and jackets bearing the emblems of their blocs-TRW, Pfizer, Toshiba, Tupolev, ARAMCO-the blazons of the Rock War-
victors borne with careless pride by the jocks who had won them their place in the sky. Six feet three inches in height, Sarah stalks among them in a black satin jacket, blazoned on its back with a white crane that rises to the starry firmament amid a flock of chrome-bright Chinese characters. It is the badge of a small bloc that does most of its business out of Singapore, and is hardly ever seen here in the Florida Free Zone. Her face is unknown to the regulars, but it is hoped they won't think it odd, not as odd as it would seem if she wore the badge of Tupolev or Kikuyu Optics I.G.
Her sculpted face is pale, the Florida tan gone, her eyes black-rimmed. Her almost-black hair is short on the sides and brushy on top, her nape hair falling in two thin braids down her back. Chrome-steel earrings brush her shoulders. Firebud has broadened her already-broad shoulders and pared down the width of her pelvis; her face is sharp and pointed beneath a widow's peak, looking like a succession of arrowheads, the shaped charge that Cunningham demands. She wears black dancing slippers laced over the ankles and dark purple stretch overalls with suspenders that frame her breasts, stretching the fabric over the nipples that Firebud has made more prominent. Her shirt is gauze spangled with silver; her neck scarf, black silk. There is a two-way spliced into her auditory nerve and a receiver tagged to the optic centers of her forebrain, at the moment monitoring police broadcasts, a constant Times Square of an LED running amber, at will, above her expanded vision.
Gifts from Cunningham. Her hardwired nerves are her own. So is Weasel.
I LOVE MY KIKUYU EYES, SEZ PRIMO PORNOSTAR ROD MCLEISH, AND WITH THE INFRARED OPTION, I CAN TELL 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 hopes had dealt him into. But the tears are long gone and in their place is hardened steel desire-the desire shared by all the dirtgirls and mudboys. To achieve it she has to want it more than the others, and she has to be willing to do what is necessary-or to have it done to her, if it comes to that. Involuntarily her hand rises to her throat as she thinks of Weasel. No, there is no time for tears.
"Looking for work, Sarah?" The voice comes from the quiet white man who has been sitting at the end of the bar. He has come closer, one hand on the back of the bar stool next to her. He is smiling as if he is unaccustomed to it.
She narrows her eyes as she looks at him sidelong, and takes a deliberately long drink. "Not the kind of work you have in mind, collarboy," she says.
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