"Уильям Гибсон. Virtual light (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

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name="1 The luminous flesh of giants">1 The luminous flesh of
giants

The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon,
high-impact plastic. He watches a gunship traverse the city's middle distance like a
hunting wasp, death slung beneath its thorax in a smooth black pod.

Hours earlier, missiles have fallen in a northern suburb;
seventy-three dead, the kill as yet unclaimed. But here the mirrored ziggurats down
Lбzaro Cбrdenas flow with the luminous flesh of giants, shunting out the night's barrage
of dreams to the waiting avenidas-business as usual, world without end.

The air beyond the window touches each source of light with a faint
hepatic corona, a tint of jaundice edging imperceptibly into brownish translucence. Fine
dry flakes of fecal snow, billowing in from the sewage flats, have lodged in the lens of
night.

Closing his eyes, he centers himself in the background hiss of
climate-control. He imagines himself in Tokyo, this room in some new wing of the old
Imperial. He sees himself in the streets of Chiyoda-ku, beneath the sighing trains. Red
paper lanterns line a narrow lane.

He opens his eyes.

Mexico City is still there.

The eight empty bottles, plastic miniatures, are carefully aligned
with the edge of the coffee table: a Japanese vodka, Come Back Salmon, its name more
irritating than its lingering aftertaste.

On the screen above the console, the ptichka await him, all in a
creamy frieze. When he takes up the remote, their high sharp cheekbones twist in the space
behind his eyes. Their young men, invariably entering from behind, wear black leather
gloves.

Slavic faces, calling up unwanted fragments of a childhood: the reek
of a black canal, steel racketing steel beneath a swaying train, the high old ceilings of
an apartment overlooking a frozen park.