"Carter, Raphael - The Fortunate Fall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Carter Raphael)
"What are you going to do?" she said.
"I'm going to apply for immediate repartnering. If they'll take it without a reason, fine. If not, I'll put down unprofessional conduct, which would be true even if you were just an overeager megascops."
"You don't even trust me enough to give me one chance to prove that I am who I say I am?"
"I quit believing in trust twenty years ago, over one hell of a cup of tea."
On the disk her face clouds for an instant. Watching it now, freezing the moment, zooming in, I wonder if her enhancements sped up emotion, as well as thought. Was this the brief catch in the throat it seemed to be, or was she crying in there for hours, in her silicon cage? Or--I cannot help but think it--was that sob a cover, under which she plotted the next phase of her deception?
When I unpause the disk, she says quietly: "You'd have to have absolute proof."
"Yes."
"Then I'll give you your trust through a cable," she said with sudden vehemence, "since that's the only kind you understand."
"You must be joking. I'm not going to give you a direct line to my brain."
She lifted her eyebrows incredulously. "You really think you can keep me out, if I want in?"
If I had been able to stop the disk then, as I can now, I might have seen this as the product of rejection and despair. But at the time, I could think only one thing. Keishi Mirabara scared the hell out of me.
I reached for my Net chip, but too late. She had grasped her totem in her fist and thrust it into my head, a symbol of the invisible connection she was making through the Net. (Now, replaying it in slow motion, I can feel a tingling as the granite spire passes the skull, but only silence as it moves through layer after layer of unfeeling brain.) Then all at once her mind was there, out at the end of the virtual cable, and it was impossible not to stretch out to it, impossible not to touch those memories, so much clearer than my own. And gradually, gently, passively, her mind gave up its secrets.
"Am I a cop, Maya Tatyanichna?" she said at last.
"No. I guess you're not."
She drew the totem out. "You believed it, though, didn't you? You didn't have a trace of doubt. You really don't trust me."
"Keishi, why the devil should I trust you?" I nourished the anger I felt, knowing that nothing else could make me say what I had to say. "I've known you for two days--no, not so much, not two. The ink isn't even dry on our partnering assignment. I don't know you and you don't know me. You think we have a connection because of all the things you've sucked out of my mind by screening, but that isn't real. Trust comes when you've worked with someone for years; it doesn't speed up just because you can think fast, and it doesn't materialize when you stick a cable in someone's head. What you get from screening me isn't friendship, it's data. We're strangers."
She looked down to hide the moistness in her eyes. "Yes," she said, "I guess we are."
And she vanished--leaving me feeling like I'd just told a child that her mother was dead, not because it was true, but just for fun. But I had to be ruthless, yes, ruthless. For with the Net linking our minds, she had not been able to hide it. Keishi Mirabara was in love.
SIX
That night I went over the research, with Keishi's thoughts haunting my mind.
"Most images of the Holocaust come from photos taken during the Allied liberation of the camps," she said once, "but the Square Miles were liberated by the Unanimous Army, which did not take pictures, and whose component selves did not remember the experience." And again: "The Nazis had only a few years to carry out their pogrom. The Guardians had nearly fifty, and they had the whole world to do it in. In fifty years you can raise new generations that have never known anything but tyranny. You can destroy not just a people, but all memory of a people." By nine o'clock the next morning--late evening by my body clock--my mind began to wander, her voice intruding on my free associations in a surreal counterpoint. Soon my thoughts turned to what I'd felt from Keishi through the cable, and the moistdisk announced: "The homosexual prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps were not released when the camps were liberated. Not only were they returned to prison, but their time in the camps was not counted toward their sentences. Compare Calinshchina."
"Christ," I said.
"Yeah, that one's a bitch, isn't it?"
I'd grown so used to hearing her voice in my head that I forgot to be startled. She was walking toward me through the slanting sunlight in the hall; a black fedora cast a diagonal shadow across her face. She wore a mask of eggshell-thin ceramic, after the African fashion, matte white. When she smiled, the mask copied her expression, but its features were not hers. Her image was so vivid that I thought it must be real, until I noticed that the milling dustmotes were indifferent to her presence. Had she been flesh, they would have swirled about her as she walked, as if recoiling from her touch.
She came to the doorway and stopped, leaning against the wall and watching me to see what I would do. She was wearing a Word: a gold cartouche on her lapel that, from time to time, would pluck a single word from her thoughts and display it. That's the fashion, too--a random, drop-by-drop exposure that always struck me as faintly obscene. At the moment it said inversion, for no reason I could think of.
"You've got to quit barging in on me like this, Mirabara."
"I seem to have this problem knocking," she said, passing her hand through the wall. "But I'll ring the videophone next time."
"That would be nice. Just in case I'm in the shower or something," I said, and inversion faded into soap. "So is this just general neighborliness, or is there a special reason for this visit?"
Foodchain flashed on the Word as she said "Depends. You want to do an interview?"
"Who?"
"Pavel Sergeyevich Voskresenye."
The moistdisk instantly supplied an image. I was reading a tattered old book at impossible speeds. I closed it with a snap. The spine said: Victims of the Square Miles, by P. S. Voskresenye. It was one of the first books published during the early Reconstruction, and a cornerstone of Keishi's research.
"Voskresenye is alive?"
"He's got a pulse and a Netname. Beyond that, I wouldn't expect much. At his age he ought to be half fossilized."
"What's his real name?"
"That's what's on the records: Voskresenye."
"Not Voskresenski?"
"Nope, that's what it says. 'Mister Sunday.' And it gets better. He's operating as Pavel of hearth
"What the hell kind of a clan name is that?"
"A fake one," she said, and waited.
"More than that," I said. "There's plain fake, and then there's obviously fake. If he just didn't want to be found, he'd have plain fake. But Darkness-at-Noon is obviously fake. He wants everyone to know that he doesn't want to be found. It's a challenge."
Keishi smiled, a teacher pleased with her slow but faithful student. I turned to the videophone and repeated the Netname. White letters appeared on the screen: "Connected. Video unavailable."
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