"Timothy Zahn - Deadman Switch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

Deadman Switch


Timothy Zahn

DEADMAN SWITCH

Chapter 1
I'd been sitting at the window of my small cubicle for nearly an hour, listening to a Joussein
symphonaria and watching the intricate drift of sunlight and shadow across the city from a hundred
twenty stories up, when the call I'd been expecting all morning finally came. "Gilead? You in there?"

"Yes, sir," I replied, turning off the music with a wave of my control stick and standing up. The
Carillon Building's intercom speakers were very good, and I had no trouble discerning the
excitement and anticipation in my employer's voice. With Lord Kelsey-Ramos, that could mean only
one thing. "I take it the raid is nearly finished?"

He snorted, just loudly enough for me to hear. "Is it that obvious?"

"It is to me," I said simply.

He snorted again. "Well, you're right. Come on in."

"Yes, sir." Stepping across the starkly plain room—kept so by my own request—I set the control
stick down by the player and crossed to the second of the room's two doors. "Gilead Raca Benedar,"
I told it, speaking distinctly. The voicelock was a slightly ridiculous precaution, here in what
amounted to Carillon's inner sanctum, but I'd long since stopped feeling annoyed by it. Paranoia, in
one form or another, was one of the many burdens of wealth.

The door opened; and from my cubicle I entered Lord Kelsey-Ramos's office.

Lord Kelsey-Ramos himself had once likened the contrast of the two rooms to that between
midnight and noon; but for me that comparison fell far short. From the dark at the bottom of a mine
shaft to noon, perhaps; or even to the searing brightness outside a sunskimmer's slingshot pass by a
star. For a pair of heartbeats I paused there on the threshold, senses struggling as they adjusted from
the peace of my undecorated room and quiet music to the flamboyant luxury laid out before me.

To the luxury, and even more to the shrewdly engineered contradictions embedded within it. The
milky-white living carpet, the shimmering Vedant woodling panels and camocarvings, the massive
gemrock desk—the sense of the room reaching my eyes was one of extreme wealth, calm and stable.
At the same time, the subtle yet distinctive sounds of the InWeb news/data analyzer and Wall Street
Interactive machine gave off a totally opposite sense, that of frantic haste and unrest. It created just


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Deadman Switch

enough emotional confusion that first-time visitors were invariably thrown slightly off stride, though
few of them realized on a conscious level just what it was that was bothering them.