"David Brin - A Stage of Memory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

Something to get me up.
"They call it Time-Jizz." Barney handed Derek a packet of white powder. "It's the
latest thing out o' the Black Chemists. Man, this time they've really stolen a march on
the guv'mint. Time-Jizz is the biggest thing there is now."
"What it is, man? What's it do, bro?" Derek unconsciously adopted the dialect of
his supplier, mimicking the street tempo perfectly.
"Mooch-hooch, baby. With this stuff you can go back to any limber scene you
ever had, and relive it. I mean, I tried it an' it works! I went back to the best lay I
ever had, and man, I found out my memory weren't exaggeratin' one bit.
Mmm-mmm."
Derek fingered the packet. "I dunno, Barney. A new blam-scam from the Black
Chemists... I don't want no junkie-monkey, now."
"Aw, the shrinks have had this stuff f'years!" the dealer soothed. "Word is it's
safe. No monkey, for sure, babe. And you get to choose the time and place you go
back and visit! Shoot. A deal like that makes you think them Black Chemists were
really brothers after all, and not a bunch of old white syndicate clowns with Pee aitch
Dees."
The powder glistened in the light from a bare bulb. Derek stared at it.
"Anywhere or anytime I wanted..."he murmured.
"Yeah, man, you could go back to when you were suckin' Baby Ruths and
peekin' up girls' dresses."
"My childhood was a boring crock." Derek snickered. "Still," he added
thoughtfully. "It had its moments. Anyway, as the serpent used to say, why not?"
He looked up and saw the dealer was staring at him. "George Bernard Shaw," he
explained. "From Back to Methuselah."
"Sure, man." Barney shrugged. "Anything you say. Now about the price. Startin'
out I can offer you a real sweet deal..."
Derek came home to his cheap studio to find the mail slot filled with bills. He shut
the door with his foot and let the envelopes slip to the floor. He poured a can of
soup into a pan and stirred it over a hotplate. He contemplated a small vial of amber
fluid, one of Bettide's ampules, on the counter in front of him.
Derek felt trapped. He had been accessing increasingly recent memories, more
and more painful to face. He wasn't sure he could go through the final two years'
worth of total recall.
He would be gambling the pain of recent memories against Dr. Bettide's
hypothetical "breakthrough"... when all the storage in his mind would supposedly be
his again, reachable at will.
Reliving that episode with the kids at the improv--and then his first purchase of
Time-Jizz from dealer Barney--had driven him away from the drug for a few days.
He had walked around in a depressed haze, getting stoned on older, less terrifying
highs.
He hung around a few theaters, milking a few tourists who recognized him. He
ignored their whispers to each other after he finished signing autographs.
Finally, he found himself at the office of Frank Furtess, his old agent. Old
Frankfurter had looked genuinely surprised to see him. Then Derek remembered. He
had fired Furtess more than a year ago, using nearly every piece of invective in the
book.
Derek realized that he had adopted a frame of reference twenty months old, and
momentarily forgotten the incident! By then he had already shaken the agent's hand;
he had to play the scene to its end.