"Carter, Raphael - The Fortunate Fall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Carter Raphael)
"You don't have instincts yet," I said. "You haven't earned them."
"Oh, God, not this again. I thought I took care of this before--"
"You took care of it by lying to me, yes. You can't expect me to stick to that now that the lie's been uncovered."
"Scratch 'video game,'" she said. "Insert 'soap opera.' " She turned aside, and I thought she would leave. Then she wheeled back around and said in a burst of energy: "Why do you have to make this so complicated? Why won't you understand--"
"Because I can't," I said.
She made a vague searching gesture, as though about to argue the point, then hesitated. She fixed her eyes on my encyclopedia. Doubt crossed her face like a shadow. "No," she said bleakly, "you can't. Of course you can't. I don't know why I ever expected anything else."
I took out my Net chip, and she vanished. For a while I sat with my hand on the moistdisk, lest she should, by some miracle, find a way in through that. She didn't. I moved my hand around to the front of my head, and rested it against the familiar warmth of my suppressor chip.
I want to say that it's horrible. I want to tell you that being suppressed makes every moment of existence a torment, because maybe that would help--but it would be a lie. In fact, the most horrible thing is how easy it is to slide into contentment, how hard it is to nourish anger or regret. If you lost the sense of smell, say, or taste, you'd grieve for it; but if you were born without that sense, you'd never miss it. You'd almost forget there was such a thing as smell, until someone reminded you, and even then you'd only half believe it. That's how it was for me--the sense was gone, as though it had never been. For the first few years after suppression, I kept myself in misery by sheer effort of will, trying to imagine, every day, what it was that I had lost. But in the end, it became too much trouble. I gave in to the inevitable. I forgot.
It must, I supposed, have been terribly strong, for me to risk so much. Did it come over me by surprise, like a storm uprooting everything? Or was it always there, enriching my perceptions--as when Keishi covered my eyes, making the dark world bright with salts and textures? I didn't know. In those early years, when I imagined desire, I used to think of it as an energy that clings to objects-- an electricity, that sparks and dies in every rustling of a dress, and that lives deep among the wires beneath the skin.
But those were only words. I could no more bring back the feeling with them than a man desouled in grayspace could remember the smell of a rose. I had forgotten. I had grown complacent.
And now she came into my life, and offered me all of it back-- and I must refuse it. Because it would mean being dependent on her forever. Because I could never ask her to leave. Because when it was over between us, or when her enhancements aged into obsolescence, some automatic spy would sniff me out and we'd both disappear. It was impossible. I liked her--it was not that; might have liked her a lot under other circumstances; but it was impossible. The false intimacy of the screening chip had ruined any chance of friendship, much less love.
If only, I thought, I could meet her in some other place, where the Net did not reach, and where the only cables were the roots by which the grasses passed along their ancient thoughts. If only we could meet there as if for the first time, and talk together as two strangers talk: locked into our separate skulls, as though nothing had been said between us.
(The Helmet)
(Dreams don't contain symbols. Where would they come from? Not from some collective unconscious--we're not born cabled to the world-mind, that's a myth. Not from your own mind, either; symbols are hard enough to invent when you're awake, you're not going to come up with them fast asleep. So if something in a dream looks like a cross between a vidphone and your cat, it's not because your cat is like a vidphone; it's because you're too sleepy to make up your mind. If Mr. Yablokov turns into your father, it's not because he reminds you of your father, it's because there's no continuity director.
That night, I did not dream of Keishi. Instead I dreamed, over and over, that I met Pavel Voskresenye. He was an old man, sitting in a wooden chair. Blood was leaking from a small hole in his temple. As I watched from a coign of vantage, he reached up and guided down an enormous helmet which, when he locked it into place, engulfed his head completely. But it was not a helmet: it was a brain, from the back of which there trailed a spine a hundred meters long, like a skeleton in a museum. The rest of him sat motionless, but the spine began to twitch, drawing all my attention toward it. It shuddered, then rippled sinuously like the body of a snake. At last, with an effort that wrinkled his brow, the spine raised itself and arched forward over his head, like the tail of a scorpion.)
Seven
"Put in your code chip."
All right, I subvoked, fumbling it into my head. Are we scrambled?
"Yeah, we're locked up tight. I still don't see the point, though." Neither do I, but we might as well do what he says. It can't hurt anything.
I'd come early and waited for a parking place near the Horseman to open up, so I could watch for him from the car. Now I was having second thoughts about the whole plan. He'd probably counted on recognizing me from my Net-portrait, in which case we were in trouble. And there was little hope of his being unmistakable: on that sidewalk, no one could have been so outlandish as to stand out.
Or so I thought until I happened to glance in the rear-view mirror, and saw a man of about the right age, wearing a heavy black overcoat that was wildly inappropriate for the early spring sweater-weather. I half-opened the door for a better look. His head was full of sockets of every possible design, and he was not only wearing a coat, but gloves--black and lumpish. He was unmistakable, all right.
"Voskresenye?" I called out.
The man looked at me as though I were mad. "Voistinu voskresye--but not today!"
Oh. Khristos voskresye is an old Easter greeting meaning "Christ is risen." Voistinu voskresye is the answer--"truly he is risen"--but of course, it wasn't Easter. Well, it wouldn't be the last time I'd make an idiot out of myself in the name of journalism. For a moment I was afraid he'd think I was a wirehead trying to steal the car--I've got enough sockets to look the part--but he passed by without further comment, disappearing into the crowd.
Then the passenger door seemed to open by itself. I flipped open the cover of the Electrify switch and had my finger on the toggle when he hissed, "It's me--Voskresenye!" and climbed into the seat with a peculiar crab-motion, still crouching down.
"What the hell are you doing?"
"No time. Pretend you've given up on me and drive away."
One of the advantages of driving a car of Reconstruction vintage is that they generally put in a few concealed weapons. There was a ceramic flechette gun behind a panel just beneath the driver's side armrest; a tap with my left hand, a quick grab with my right, and I'd have it. I would take the gun, make him get out of the car, drive away, and produce some nice boring conclusion to my series on the Calinshchina. I would take the assignments I was given, and I would die in my sleep.
Then I looked at his face, and my hand wavered. He had one of every kind of socket ever made, from the round Army standard to the tiny modern squares, but the ones at his temples were like nothing I'd ever seen before: oval, with three concentric rings of pins inside. And the jagged scar that went all the way around his head was beyond the clumsiness of even the most disreputable Moscow hack. He'd been modified by the Guardians.
I turned my sigh of resignation into one of frustration and slumped my shoulders to mime discouragement. After another thirty seconds of craning my neck I muttered, "The hell with it, then," found a tiny chink in the wall of traffic, and threaded the car into it.
"You shouldn't have called out my name," he said, straightening up. "I know you didn't know, and it can't be helped now in any case. But I don't think we've fooled anyone. We'll have to try to lose ourselves in traffic."
"Voskresenye, why are we acting like fugitives?"
"I know how all this must seem, Maya Tatyanichna. But I am not paranoid, nor am I being overcautious. On the contrary, it is reckless of me even to risk speaking to you. I am widely accounted a most desirable person to have at one's tea party. Ask your screener."
"He's telling the truth," Keishi said. "He's been wanted by the Fusion of Historical Nations since before it fused."
What for?
"Oh, treason, terrorism, conspiracy to overthrow the government. Little things like that."
I thought wistfully of the flechette gun and the chance that had evaporated when I decided not to use it.
Why didn't you tell me this before?
"It never occurred to me to check for warrants on someone his age," she said with chagrin.
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |