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

flare, once, and briefly, with the reflected ruby of a nightclub's laser, then gone.

The driver is staring at him.

He tells the driver to return to the hotel.





face="Arial">He comes awake from a dream of metal voices, down the vaulted
concourses of some European airport, distant figures glimpsed in mute rituals of
departure.

Darkness. The hiss of climate-control.

The touch of cotton sheets. His telephone beneath the pillow. Sounds
of traffic, muted by the gas-filled windows. All tension, his panic, are gone. He
remembers the atrium bar. Music. Faces.

He becomes aware of an inner balance, a rare equilibrium. It is all
he knows of peace.

And, yes, the glasses are here, tucked beside his telephone. He
draws them out, opening the ear pieces with a guilty pleasure that has somehow endured
since Prague.

Very nearly a decade he has loved her, though he doesn't think of it
in those terms. But he has never bought another piece of software and the black plastic
frames have started to lose their sheen. The label on the cassette is unreadable now,
sueded white with his touch in the night. So many rooms like this one.

He has long since come to prefer her in silence. He no longer
inserts the yellowing audio beads. He has learned to provide his own, whispering to her as
he fast-forwards through the clumsy titles and up the moonlit ragged hiliscape of a place
that is neither Hollywood nor Rio, but some soft-focus digital approximation of both.

She is waiting for him, always, in the white house up the canyon
road. The candles. The wine. The jet-beaded dress against the matte perfection of her
skin, such whiteness, the black beads drawn smooth and cool as a snake's belly up her
tensed thigh.

Far away, beneath cotton sheets, his hands move.

Later, drifting toward sleep of a different texture, the phone
beneath his pillow chimes softly and only once.

'Yes?'

'Confirming your reservation to San Francisco,' someone says, either