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

Twenty-eight peripheral images frame the Russians in their earnest
coupling; he glimpses figures carried from the smoke-blackened car-deck of an Asian ferry.

He opens another of the little bottles.

Now the ptichka, their heads bobbing like well-oiled machines,
swallow their arrogant, self-absorbed boyfriends. The camera angles recall the ardor of
Soviet industrial cinema.

His gaze strays to NHK Weather. A low-pressure front is crossing
Kansas. Next to it, an eerily calm Islamic downlink ceaselessly reiterates the name of God
in a fractal-based calligraphy.

He drinks the vodka.

He watches television.





face="Arial">After midnight, at the intersection of Liverpool and Florencia, he
stares out at the Zona Rosa from the back of a white Lada, a nanopore Swiss respirator
chafing his freshly shaven chin.

And every passing face is masked, mouths and nostrils concealed
behind filters. Some, honoring the Day of the Dead, resemble the silver-beaded jaws of
grinning sugar-skulls. Whatever form they take, their manufacturers all make the same
dubious, obliquely comforting claims about viroids.

He's thought to escape the sameness, perhaps discover something of
beauty or passing interest, but here there are only masked faces, his fear, the lights.

An ancient American car comes creeping through the turn, out of
Avenida Chapultepec, gouts of carbon puising from beneath a dangling bumper. A dusty rind
of cola-colored resin and shattered mirror seals its every surface; only the windshield is
exposed, and this is black and glossy, opaque as a blob of ink, reminding him of the
gunship's lethal pod. He feels the fear begin to accrete, seamlessly, senselessly, with
absolute conviction, around this carnival ghost, the Cadillac, this oil-burning relic in
its spectral robe of smudged mosaic silver. Why is it allowed to add its filth to the
already impossible air? Who sits inside, behind the black windshield?

Trembling, he watches the thing pass.

'That car ...' He finds himself leaning forward, compulsively
addressing the broad brown neck of the driver, whose massive ear lobes somehow recall
reproduction pottery offered on the hotel's shopping channel.

'El coche,' says the driver, who wears no mask, and turning, now
seems to notice the courier for the first time. The courier sees the mirrored Cadillac