"Нейл Стефенсон. Snow Crash (Снежная лавина, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

A blinding light from the heavens shines down upon them. Her Knight
Visions keep her from being blinded, but the customers bend their knees and
hunch their shoulders as though the light were heavy. The men hold their
hairy forearms up against their brows, swivel their great tubular bodies to
and fro, trying to find the source of the illumination, muttering clipped
notations to each other, brief theories about its source, fully in control
of the unknown phenomenon. The women coo and flutter. Because of the magical
influence of the Knight Visions, Y.T. can still see the LEDs: 29:54, and
that's what it says when she drops the pizza on Mr. Pudgely's wing tips.
The mystery light goes off.


___________ The others are still blinded, but Y.T. sees into the night
with her Knight Visions, sees all the way into near infrared, and she sees
the source of it, a double.bladed stealth helicopter thirty feet above the
neighbor's house. It is tastefully black and unadorned, not a news
crew-though another helicopter, an old-
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SNOW CRASH
fashioned audible one, brightly festooned with up-to.the-minute logos,
is thumping and whacking its way across White Columns airspace at this very
moment, goosing the plantations with its own spotlight, hoping to be the
first to obtain this major scoop:
a pizza was delivered late tonight, film at eleven. Later, our per.
sonality journalist speculates on where Uncle Enzo will stay when he makes
his compulsory trip to our Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area. But the
black chopper is running dark, would be nearly invisible if not for the
infrared trail coming out of its twin turbo jets.
It is a Mafia chopper, and all they wanted to do was to record the
event on videotape so that Mr. Pudgely would not have a leg to hop around on
in court, should he decide to take his case down to Judge Bob's Judicial
System and argue for a free pizza.
One more thing. There's a lot of shit in the air tonight, a few
megatons of topsoil blowing down from Fresno, and so when the laser beam
comes on it is startlingly visible, a tiny geometric line, a million blazing
red grains strung on a fiber-optic thread, snapping into life instantly
between the chopper and Y.T.'s chest. It appears to widen into a narrow fan,
an acute triangle of red light whose base encompasses all of Y.T.'s torso.
It takes half a second. They are scanning the many bar codes mounted on
her chest. They are finding out who she is. The Mafia now knows everything
about Y.T.-where she lives, what she does, her eye color, credit record,
ancestry, and blood type.
That done, the chopper tilts and vanishes into the night like a hockey
puck sliding into a bowl of India ink. Mr. Pudgely is saying something,
making a joke about how close they came, the others eke out a laugh, but
Y.T. cannot hear them because they are buried under the thunderwhack of the
news chopper, then flash-frozen and crystalized under its spotlight. The
night air is full of bugs, and now Y.T. can see all of them, swirling in
mysterious formations, hitching rides on people and on currents of air.
There is one on her wrist, but she doesn't slap at it.