"Aldridge, Ray - The Spine DiversV1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldridge Ray)

For an instant Odorini's direct gaze seemed tinged with dislike, but perhaps I was mistaken. "No, no. Not tonight. She is still recovering from injuries . . . on her last hunt, a fish cut her badly. But soon enough she will be ready."

"I see," I said.

Odorini waited, once again an avatar of self-possession, sharp old face pleasantly blank.

"Well, then, tonight. Perhaps the Well?" I said.

He bowed. "Meet me here an hour past sunset. If that is convenient."

The day passed without profit. I took a steep path down to the Azure Ocean, where I found a small stony beach, littered with sunbathing offworlders. A swimming area had been set up, protected from hungry sea monsters by a charged mesh, but the murky water tempted me not at all. At the far end of the strand were a cluster of so-called "suicide rocks," where for a small fee a customer might be clamped, there to await the inrushing tide. It seemed to me an eccentric approach to self-termination, but perhaps some folk saw a certain majesty in it -- death by inexorable natural forces.

I bought a sticky mm drink at a rock-slab cabana, rented a lounge chair, and joined the other tourists for a while.

I looked down the beach, trying to think of some useful work I might do in the village, before dark and the descent into the caverns -- but without success. My mind seemed heavy and dull, and I could only hope that my imagination was still functioning somewhere below the conscious level. I noticed again that many of the offworlders carried recording gear, some of it of professional quality. As I watched the tiny cameras hovering over their owners, an unpleasant image came to me: the cameras looked a little like flies attracted to some offal washed up on the sand. The odor of rotting seaweed contributed a degree of authenticity to this unfortunate perception.

No other colorful metaphors occurred to me and I quickly grew bored. I gulped down my drink and made to rise.

"Hello," said someone, in the Dilvermoon trade patois, my native tongue.

I turned, to see a smiling tourist approaching me. She wore a fashionable bathing sash about her narrow waist. She was tall and wore her long red hair in a knot of braids. All of her body hair had been replaced with stylized tattoos, so that from a distance red curls seemed to flow up her belly in languid chevrons. Though a trifle over-voluptuous for my taste, she possessed the physical perfection available to any Dilvermooner of means. Two external cameras orbited her and she had a forearm dataslate identical to mine, except that it was new. She wanted to compare equipment. We exchanged names. She was a beginner, but fairly knowledgeable and apparently wealthy enough to start with quality gear. We discussed her setup, and then I let it slip that I was a professional.

She became vivacious. "Tell me about your work, please."

"Well . . . . I travel about to unusual places . . . like this. Then I try to see with clear eyes. Then I spend a lot of time in the studio, trying to put together a true picture of what I've seen."

"Do you publish under your own name?"

I sighed. "Yes. But there's no particular reason for you to have heard of me. I'm obscure. Or, as I like to think of it, I have a small but select audience."

"Oh," she said. "That sounds nice. I'll have to look for your chips when I get home. But . . . well, do you think there's still a market for, you know, the plain old travelogue? One of my husbands is a factor for one of the Bo'eme clearing houses, and he says the vogue of the one-person production is over. Dead and gone. He says people want epics these days. Casts of thousands. Multi-track memories. Grand dramas, tight plotting, life-or-death situations."

"He may be right," I said, a little stiffly. She was articulating my worst fear. "But some still appreciate the subtleties of a simple, deep, personal experience. I hope so, anyway."

"I'm sure you know more about it than he does," she said consolingly, and wandered away.

When she was gone, I felt drowned in desperation and lethargy.

At length the siren sounded and we all got up to go. Offshore, the Azure Ocean began to boil as the tide poured from crevices below. I felt a subtle trembling in the stones beneath my feet -- the transmitted violence of the tide as it broke against the other side of the Spine. Metal doors slid up to seal off the rock-slab cabana. The man who rented the lounge chairs went around collecting them, and he started up the cliff trail with several dozen nested on his back.

The rest of us followed immediately, except for a group down by the suicide rocks. A woman was apparently awaiting the tide, surrounded by her family -- or perhaps just a gaggle of morbid tourists, all of whom had emotigogue recorders and free-flying cameras. The woman had a tired, rather pleasant face. She didn't seem at all anxious; probably she'd bought a sample of the drug in the village. The metal bands that held her wrists and ankles sparkled in the westering sun.

I knew I ought to go down and make a record of this defining event --suicide was a major industry in the village, as one might expect. But for some reason I couldn't bring myself to do so.

I left the other tourists to watch the tide climb the Heights and went in search of lunch. I found a clean-looking basement cafe down a narrow alley; it advertised "genuine Northern Spine cuisine." This consisted of a variety of fish and mollusks -- pickled, smoked, dried -- as well as several kinds of weedy vegetables, accompanied by a gray crumbly algae-based bread. I'd had much worse, and I tried to keep an open mind. My fans deserve that consideration. The strong greasy flavors that lay so heavily on my palate might well seem marvelous to some. Of course, these days most playback consoles allow their users to isolate a single sensory track -- taste, for instance -- and suppress any unwanted tracks. So my fans will not be entirely at the mercy of my unappreciative thoughts.

After lunch I went back to my room to do a little editing.

I carry a large folding flatscreen monitor on all my trips. It's not holographic. Human vision isn't holographic. . . that's my reasoning. Even though my little remote records a partially holographic image, via radar-ranging I don't use that capability in my finished chips. I don't want that jarring textural contrast between the images recorded from my optic nerve and images recorded by the camera, so I flatten the camera's input into an ordinary stereo image. Besides, there's nothing more annoying to an .artist than to see people walking around their holocubes, peering into the corners, looking for the little details the artist didn't want them to notice. People enjoy doing that, but so what? With my stuff, they have to be content to see what I see. I only use external images when necessary for clarity. A critic said of my last chip ". . .clings with tiny weak claws to his outmoded technique, attempts to conceal his limitations beneath a false and labored simplicity." I'm not fashionable, I know -- that's one reason for my declining popularity, so my agent Dalrimple Cleame tells me.