"Williams,.Walter.Jon.-.Hardwired" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

"Not a thatch?"
He shrugs out of her embrace and goes to sit on the sofa. "No," he mumbles. "An old guy. Lonely, I guess. Easy to please. Wants to talk more than anything." He sees the plastic pack of endorphins and picks it up, searching through it. Sarah sees two more vials vanish between his fingers.
"Daud," she says, her voice a warning. "That's our food and rent-I've got to get it on the street."
"Just one," Daud says. He drops the other back in the bag, holds up one to let her see it. Cigarette ash drifts to the floor.
"You've already had your share," Sarah says.
His pale eyes flicker in his dark face. "Okay," he says. But he doesn't put the vial down.
His need is too strong. She looks down and shakes her head. "One," she agrees. "Okay." He pockets it, then picks up the loaded injector and dials a dosage-a high dosage, she knows. She resists the urge to check the injector, knowing that someday if he goes on this way he'll put himself in a coma, but knowing how much he'd resent her concern. Sarah watches as the endorphin hits his head, as he lies back and sighs, his twitchy nervousness gone.
She takes the injector and frees the vial, then puts it in the plastic bag. There is a half smile on Daud's face as he looks up at her. "Thanks, Sarah," he says.
"I love you," she says.
He closes his eyes and strops his back on the sofa like a cat. His throat makes strange whimpering noises. She takes the bag and walks into her room and throws the bag on her bed. A wave of sadness whispers through her veins like a drug of melancholy. Daud will die before long, and she can't stop it.
Once it had been she who stood between him and life; now it is the endorphins that keep him insulated from the things that want to touch him. Their father had been crazy and violent, and half her scars were Daud's by right; she had suffered them on his behalf, shielding him with her body. The madman's beatings had taught her to fight back, had made her hard and quick, but she couldn't be there all the time. The old man had sensed weakness in Daud, and found it. When Sarah was fourteen she'd run with the first boy who'd promised her a place free from pain; two years later, when she'd bought her way out of her first contract and come back for him, Daud had been shattered beyond repair, the needle already in his arm. She'd led him to the new house where she worked-it was the only place she had-and there he'd learned to earn his living, as she had learned in her own time. He is broken still, and as long as they are in the streets, there is no way of healing him.
If she hadn't cracked, if she hadn't run away, she might have been able to protect him. She won't crack again.
She returns to the other room and sees Daud lying on the sofa, one sandal hanging with the straps tangled between his toes. Tobacco smoke drifts up from his nostrils. Jackstraw is sitting next to him on the sofa and drinking one of his beers. He glances up.
"You look like you're limping," Jackstraw says. "Would you like me to rub your legs?"
"No," Sarah says quickly; and then realizes she is being too sharp. "No," she says again, with a smile. "Thank you. But it's a bone bruise. If you touched me, I'd scream."

ARTIFICIAL DREAMS

The Plastic Girl is a hustler's idea of the good life. There is a room for zonedance, and there are headsets that plug you into euphoric states or pornography or whatever it is you need and are afraid to shoot into your veins. Orbital pharmaceutical companies provide the effects free, as advertising for their products. There are dancers on the mirrored bar in the back, a bar equipped with arcade games so that if you win, a connection snaps in one of the dancer's garments and it falls off. If you win big, all the clothes fall off all the dancers at once.
Sarah is in the big front room: brassy music, red leather booths, brass ornaments. She does not, and will probably never, rate the quiet room in the back, all brushed aluminum and a lot of dark wood that might have been the last mahogany tree in Southeast Asia-that room is for the big boys who run this fast and dangerous world, and though there isn't a sign that says NO WOMEN ALLOWED, there might as well be. Sarah is an independent contractor and rates a certain amount of respect, but in the end she is still meat for hire, though on a more elevated plane than she once was.
But still, the red room is nice. There are holograms, colors and helixes like modeled DNA, floating just above eye level, casting their variegated light through the crystal and sparkling liquor held in the patrons' hands, and there are sockets at every table for comp decks so that the patrons can keep up with their portfolios, and there are girls with reconstructed breasts and faces who come to each table in their tight plastic corsets, bring you your drink, and watch with identical and very white smiles as you put your credit needle into their tabulator and tap in a generous tip with your fingernail.
She is ready for the meet with Cunningham, wearing a navy blue jacket guaranteed to protect her against kinetic violence of up to 900 foot-pounds per square inch, and trousers good for 750. She has invested some of the endorphins and bought the time of a pair of her peers. They are walking loose about the bar, ready to keep Cunningham or his friends off her back if she needs it. She knows she needs a clear head and has kept the endorphin dose down. Pain is making her edgy, and she still can't sit. She stands at a small table and sips her rum and lime, waiting.
And then Cunningham is there. Bland face, brown eyes, brown hair, brown suit. A whispery voice that speaks of clean places she has never been, places bright and soft against the black and pure diamond.
"Okay, Cunningham," she says. "Business."
Cunningham's eyes flicker to the mirror behind her. "Friends?" he asks.
"I don't know you."
"You've called the Hetman?"
She nods. "He was complimentary," she says, "but you're not working for him; he's repaying you a favor, maybe. So I'm cautious."
"Understandable." He takes a comp deck out of an inner pocket and plugs it into the table. A pale amber screen in the depths of the dark tabletop lights up, displaying a row of figures.
"We're offering you this in dollars," he says.
Sarah feels a touch of metal on her nerves, on her tongue. The score, she thinks, the real thing. "Dollars?" she says. "Get serious."
"Gold?" Another set of figures appears.
She takes a sip of rum. "Too heavy. "
"Stock. Or drugs. Take your pick."
"What kind of stock? What kind of drugs?"
"Your choice."
"Polymyxin-phenildorphin Nu. There's a shortage right now."
Cunningham frowns. "If you like. But there'll be a lot of it coming onto the market in another three weeks or so."
Her eyes challenge him. "Did you bring it down from orbit with you?" she asks.
His face fails so much as to twitch. "No," he says. "But if I were you, I'd try chloramphenildorphin. Pfizer is arranging an artificial scarcity that will last several months. Here are the figures. Pharmacological quality, fresh from orbit."
Sarah looks at the amber numbers and nods. "Satisfactory," she says. "Half in advance."
"Ten percent now," Cunningham says. "Thirty on completion of training. The rest on completion of the contract, whether you succeed or not."
She looks up at one of the bar's moving holograms, the colors clean and bright, as pure as if seen through a vacuum. A vacuum, she thinks. The stock isn't bad, but she can do more with the drugs. Cunningham is offering her the drugs at their orbital value, where they are made and where the cost is almost nothing. The street value is far more, and with it she can buy more stock than the amount they were offering. Ten percent of that figure is more than she'd made last night, when she'd gone after the snagboy.
To get into the Orbitals you have to have skills they need, skills she can never acquire. There is another way: they can't refuse someone who owns enough shares. They are sucking up all of Earth's remaining wealth, and if you help them and buy up enough stock, they might free you from the mud forever. This is almost enough, she calculates. Almost enough for a pair of tickets to the top of the gravity well.
She brings her drink to her lips. "Let's say a quarter now," she says. "And then I'll let you buy me a drink, and you can tell me just what you want me to do to earn it.
Cunningham turns and signals to one of the smiling corset girls. "It's very simple," he says, and he looks at her with his ice-cold eyes. "We want you to make someone fall in love with you. Just for a night."

IS YOUR LOVER LOOKING FOR SOMEONE YOUNGER? YOU CAN BE THAT SOMEONE!

"The Princess is about eighty years old," Cunningham says. The holo he gives Sarah shows a pale blond girl of about twenty, dressed in a kind of ruffled blouse that exposes her rounded shoulders, the hollows of her clavicles. She has Daud's watery blue eyes and freckles above her breasts. She projects an air of vulnerable innocence.