"Robert Charles Wilson - The Cartesian Theater" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

THE CARTESIAN THEATER, by Robert Charles Wilson
Grandfather was dead but still fresh enough to give useful advice. So I rode transit out to his sanctuary in
the suburbs, hoping he could help me solve a problem, or at least set me on the way to solving it myself.

I didn't get out this way much. It was a desolate part of town, flat in every direction where the old
residences had been razed and stripped for recycling, but there was a lot of new construction going on,
mostly aibot hives. It was deceptive. You catch sight of the towers from a distance and think: I wonder
who lives there? Then you get close enough to register the colorless concrete, the blunt iteration of
simple forms, and you think: Oh, nobody's home.

Sure looked busy out there, though. All that hurry and industry, all that rising dust—a long way from the
indolent calm of Doletown.
****
At the sanctuary an aibot custodian seven feet tall and wearing a somber black waistcoat and matching
hat led me to a door marked PACZOVSKI—Grandfather's room, where a few of his worldly
possessions were arrayed to help keep his sensorium lively and alert.

He needed all the help he could get. All that remained of him was his neuroprosthetic arrays. His mortal
clay had been harvested for its biomedical utilities and buried over a year ago. His epibiotic ghost
survived but was slurring into Shannon entropy, a shadow of a shade of itself.

Still, he recognized me when I knocked and entered. “Toby!” his photograph called out.

The photo in its steel frame occupied most of the far wall. It smiled reflexively. That was one of the few
expressions Grandfather retained. He could also do a frown of disapproval, a frown of anxiety, a frown
of unhappiness, and raised eyebrows meant to register surprise or curiosity, although those last had
begun to fade in recent months.

And in a few months more there would be nothing left of him but the picture itself, as inert as a bust of
Judas Caesar (or whatever—history's not my long suite).

But he recognized the bottle of Sauvignon blanc I took out of my carrypack and placed on the rutted
surface of an antique table he had once loved. “That's the stuff!” he roared, and, “Use a coaster, for
Christ's sake, Toby; you know better than that."

I turned down his volume and stuck a handkerchief under the sweating bottle. Grandfather had always
loved vintage furniture and fine wines.

"But I can't drink it,” he added, sketching a frown of lament: “I'm not allowed."

Because he had no mouth or gut. Dead people tend to forget these things. The bottle was strictly for
nostalgia, and to give his object-recognition faculties a little kick. “I need some advice,” I said.

His eyes flickered between me and the bottle as if he couldn't decide which was real or, if real, more
interesting. “Still having trouble with that woman...?"

"Her name is Lada."

"Your employer."