"Carter, Raphael - The Fortunate Fall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Carter Raphael)

I seemed to have completely lost control of the conversation. To gain time I said--not very originally--"You are Pavel Voskresenye?"
"Yes," he said. "And I know who you are. So, the formalities being over, you may now proceed to the jugular, if you can find one."
"Don't you love it when your reputation precedes you?" Keishi whispered in my ear.
"I wasn't thinking of you as an opponent, Pavel Sergeyevich," I said. "Why are you treating me like one?"
"I have lived a long life," he said, "and I have made so many friends and so many enemies that I can no longer remember which is which. So I treat everyone as an enemy. It saves memory which can be used to better purpose."
I blinked. Lucky that Keishi had changed my interface, or I would have had to wait for him to reappear. "And why grayspace?"
"As I've explained, I have many enemies. Grayspace is not secure, not anymore, but it is more secure than vidphones; if someone happens to be listening in, it should be relatively easy to detect him."
"So ask him what he's got to hide," Keishi prompted.
I had been about to do just that. I nearly changed plans out of annoyance with her; but no, she would take that as a triumph. "Anything you say to me is going to wind up all over the Net, one way or another," I said. "What's the danger?"
"The danger, Maya Tatyanichna, is that if I tell something to a camera, the obvious way to prevent its becoming common knowledge is to kill both that camera and me before the Netcast can begin. Once the information is already on the Net, of course, that solution is useless. One must still fear revenge, but revenge is a less powerful motive than necessity."
"I see." I paused as if considering this closely, and subvoked: Keishi, just for fun, see if there's a psychiatric record on this man.
"There's not," she said. "Which isn't to say that there shouldn't be, but there isn't."
Well, it was worth a try. Aloud I said: "We somehow skipped the part of this conversation where I tell you why I'm here, and I think you've gotten the wrong impression. All I want to do is ask you a few questions about the Calinshchina. I don't see why there should be anything sensitive about that. It's part of a series that's been on News One for two weeks already. If someone wanted it suppressed, wouldn't they have done it by now?"
"Asking questions about the Calinshchina," he said, "is like pulling on a tangler's web. You can pull them all day and find nothing. But if you choose the wrong one, you never know what sort of twitching horror you may bring to light."
"I see," I said, again. Voskresenye had a knack for crafting answers that frustrated all my follow-ups; I couldn't pursue the question without risking the attention of a Weaver. I went to a canned question:
"In your book you give hundreds of survivors' stories, but you leave out your own. Why? Which Square Mile did you survive?"
"I was imprisoned at Arkhangelsk," he said, and even in gray-space, where there are no facial expressions, I could sense bitterness tinged with amusement. "Whether I survived is a matter of some debate."
"What do you mean by that?"
He paused, then replied ironically: "What records there are insist no one survived Arkhangelsk. I have allowed the misconception to persist. I would not wish to diminish Mr. Calin's crime by subtracting even one death from his body count."
It was another of his slantwise evasions. Yet I could feel myself warming to him, and if I did, so would the audience. I decided to consider this a screen test, and not worry about pinning him down. Later I'd go over the disk, analyze his strategies, and develop a response.
"There is no disk, remember?" Keishi whispered. "If you want to put your camera chip in--"
Forget it, I subvoked flatly. Record this yourself, if you want.
To Voskresenye I said, "Wouldn't you rather tell people about the millions who died, instead of just adding one to the ranks of the forgotten?"
"Naturally." His tone was nonchalant.
"Pavel Voskresenye, why don't we remember?"
The stormcloud that hung above our heads shifted uneasily. "That is a question that wants answering in a dark place where no one can listen, with all the chips out of our heads. Will you meet with me?"
"I was going to ask the same thing," I said, and added to Keishi: but not for the same reasons. "Where do you live?"
"Meet me at noon tomorrow on Nevsky Prospect, in front of the Bronze Horseman."
I frowned. "I'd rather record you on your own turf. In your home, if possible." I hate doing interviews in public places; it's not fair to the screener to make her edit out gawkers. Then, too, a house is an extension of the self--a shell the soul secretes; like faces, they leak information.
"Perhaps later," he said. "For now, the Horseman. I must ask that you come alone, and isolated from the Net. You may have an encrypted channel to your screener--I have just given her the specifications--but no more. Bring a vehicle; I will direct you to the site of the interview from there."
"You're maybe taking her to the Batcave?" Keishi said. "You want I should blindfold her?"
Keishi, behave!
"It is a most ill-mannered elephant."
"She's a loaner. My real screener's in the shop." I had been about to ask him for a different meeting place, but after Keishi's outburst, it seemed petty to press the issue. "How will I recognize you?" I asked.
"I assure you I am unmistakable. I look forward to our conversation, Maya Tatyanichna. Now if you will excuse me."
"Until tomorrow, then."
"Tomorrow." He looked up, toward where the rest of Keishi's body towered over me. "Good-bye, elephant. Such an oddity--an elephant raised by wolves."
"Yeah, same to you, buddy."
"Keishi!"
But perhaps he did not even hear her; he had already moved away, the blimp swiftly reeling in the dwarf as he receded. A single grouper, streaming toward us from the dwarf's direction, was about to overtake us--
Then I was back sitting in my living room. Rather than swim back to where we'd started, Keishi had simply pulled the plug.
It always takes me a long time to recover from going into gray-space. The parts of your brain that get copied into grayspace aren't silenced, they're just cut off from the rest of the brain. Isolated, they dream; and though the myrmichor overwrites the dream, there's always something that remains, just out of reach. I can't help trying to grasp it, though it always slips through my fingers.
Keishi, however, was awake at once. "What an asshole!" she said.
"I think he'll be all right," I said when I felt whole again. "He's got presence--it's a strange kind, but he's got it. If I could feel it even in grayspace, it should come through beautifully in the Net-cast. This could work out."
"Well, if he screens well, he screens well. There's no arguing with that," she said grudgingly. "He's still an asshole," she confided to the vidphone. Then she inclined her head and said slyly, "Have you thought any more about--"
"You know," I interrupted, "you can't keep doing this forever."
"What?"
"I know you think now that you've got something on me, you can do anything you want. And you're right, there's nothing I can do. But sooner or later, News One's going to catch on."
She rested her elbow on nothing and leaned her head against her hand. "Haven't we had this conversation already? At least once? It's like a bad video game: if you leave the castle and go back in, the Guardians are resurrected and you have to fight your way through all over again. I thought we established that I'm not a cop, or a spy, or a blackmailer. I thought we'd finally reached some understanding--"
"Of what? Of what you showed me yesterday? What does that have to do with disrupting my interviews?"