"Blind Shemmy by Jack Dann" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dann Jack)

governments that disapprove of this particular form of
gambling. -
Then the furry boy appeared like an apparition to take them to their room where they would be given time to practice and become acquainted.
The boy's member was slightly engorged, and Pfeiffer now became frightened. He suddenly thought of his mother and the obligatory hook-in service at her funeral. His skin crawled as he remembered her last filthy thoughts ....
The furry boy led Joan and Pfeiffer into the game room, which smelled of oiled wood, spices, traditional tobacco, and perfume. There were no holos or decoration on the walls. Everything, with the exception of the felt top of the gaming table, cards, thick natural carpet, computer consoles, and cowls, was made of precious woods: oak, elm, cedar, teak, walnut, mahogany, redwood, ebony. The long, half-oval gaming table, which met the sliding partition wall, was made of satinwood, as were the two delicate, but uncomfortable, high-backed chairs placed side by side. On the table before each chair was a psyconductor cowl, each one sheathed in a light, silvery mask.
"We call them poker-faces," the boy said to Pfeiffer, as he placed the cowl over Joan's head. He explained how the psyconductor mechanism worked, then asked Pfeiffer if he wished him to stay.
"Why should I want you to stay?" Pfeiffer asked, but the sexual tension between them was unmistakable.
"I'm adept at games of chance. I can redirect your thoughts-without a psyconductor." He looked at Joan and smiled.
"Put the mechanism on my head and then please leave us," Pfeiffer said.
"Do you wish me to return when you're finished?"
"If you wish," Pfeiffer replied stiffly, and Joan watched his discomfort. Without saying a word, she had won a small victory.
The boy lowered the cowl over Pfeiffer's head, made some unnecessary adjustments, and left reluctantly.
"I'm not at all sure that I want to do this," Pfeiffer mumbled, faltering.
"Well," Joan said, "we can easily call off the game. Our first connection is just practice-"
"I don't mean the game. I mean the psyconnection."
Joan remained silent. Dammit, she told herself. I should have looked away when Pfeiffer's furry pet made a pass at him.
"I was crazy to agree to such a thing in the first place."
"Shall I leave?" Joan asked. "It was you who insisted that I come along, remember?" She stood up, but did not judge the distance of the cowl/console connections accurately, and the cowl was pulled forward, bending the silver mask.
"I think you're as nervous as I am," Pfeiffer said appeasingly. .
"Make the connection, right now. Or let's get out of
here." Joan was suddenly angry and frustrated. Do it, she thought to herself, and for once she was not passive. Certainly not passive. Damn him and his furry boy! She snapped the wooden toggle switch, activating both psyconductors, and was thrust into vertiginous light. It surrounded her, as if she could see in all directions at once. But she was simply seeing through Pfeiffer's eyes. Seeing herself, small, even in his eyes, small.
After the initial shock, she realized that the light was not brilliant; on the contrary, it was soft and diffused.
But this was no connection at all: Pfeiffer was trying to close his mind to her. He appeared before her as a smooth, perfect, huge, sphere. It slowly rotated, a grim, gray planet, closed to her, forever closed ....
Are you happy now? asked Pfeiffer, as if from somewhere deep inside the sphere. It was so smooth, seamless. He really does not need me, she thought, and she felt as if she were flying above the surface of his closed mind, a winged thing looking for any discontinuity, any fault in his defenses.
So you see, Pfeiffer said, exulting in imagined victory, I don't need you. The words dame wreathed in an image of a storrri rolling angrily over the planet. ,
She flew, in sudden panic, around his thoughts, like an insect circling a source of light. She was looking for any blister or crack, any anomaly in the smooth surface. He would gamble his body away without her, that she knew, unless she could break through his defenses, prove to him how vulnerable he really was.
So you couldn't resist the furry boy, could you? Joan asked, her thoughts like smooth sharks swimming through icy water. Does he, then, remind you of yourself, or do 1 remind you of your mother?
His anger and exposed misery were like flares on the
surface of the sun. In their place remained an eruption of Pfeiffer's smooth protective surface. A crack in the cerebral egg.
Joan dove toward the fissure, and then she was inside Pfeiffer -not the outside of his senses where he could verbalize a thought, see a face, but in the dark, prehistoric places where he dreamed, conceptualized, where he floated in and out of memory, where the eyeless creatures of his soul dwelled.
It was a sliding, a slipping in, as if one had turned over inside oneself; and Joan was sliding, slipping on ice. She found herself in a dark world of grotesque and geometric shapes, an arctic world of huge icebergs floating on a fathomless sea.
And for an instant, Joan sensed 'Pfeiffer's terrible fear of the world.
Mindjucker! Pfeiffer screamed, projecting the word in a hundred filthy, sickening images; and then he smashed through Joan's defenses and rushed into the deep recesses of her mind. He found her soft places and took what he could.
All that before the pysconnection was broken. Before the real game began. As if nothing had happened.
A man and woman, wearing identical cowled masks, sat across from Joan and Pfeiffer. The partition wall had been slid back, revealing the oval shape of the gaming table and doubling the size of the wood-paneled room. The dealer and the gamesmaster sat on each side of the long table between the opponents. The dealer was a young man with an intense, roundish face and straight black hair cut at the shoulders; he was most likely in training to become a gamesmaster.
The gamesmaster's face was hidden by a black cowl; he would be hooked in to the game. He explained the rules, activated the psyconductors, and the game began. Joan and Pfeiffer were once again hooked in, but there was no contact, as yet, with the man and woman across the table.
Pfeiffer cleared his mind, just as if he were before lasers or giving an interview. He had learned to cover his thoughts, for, somehow, he had always felt they could be seen, especially by those who wanted to hurt him politically and on the job.
White thought, he called it, because it was similar to white noise.
Pfeiffer could feel Joan circling around him like the wind. Although he couldn't conceal everything, he could hide from her. He could use her, just as she could use him . . . had used him. They had reached an accord via mutual blackmail. Somehow, during their practice hook-in, Joan had forced herself into Pfeiffer's mind; shocked, he attacked her.
So now they knew each other better.
They built a simple symbol structure: He was the world, a perfect sphere without blemish, made by God's own hands, a world as strong and divine as thought; and she was his atmosphere. She contained all the elements that could not exist on his featureless surface. She was the protective cloak of his world.
They built a mnemonic in which to hide, yet they were still vulnerable to each other. But Pfeiffer guessed that Joan would remain passive-after all, she always had. She also had the well-developed conscience of a mystical liberal, and she was in love with him. He had seen that-or thought he had.
She would not depose him to danger.
Pfeiffer congratulated himself for being calm, which re-
inforced his calmness. Perhaps it was Joan's presence. Perhaps it was the mnemonic. But perhaps not. He had the willpower; this was just another test. He had managed to survive all the others, he told himself.
Joan rained on him, indicating her presence, and they practiced talking within geometric shapes as a protective device-it was literally raining geodesic cats and dogs.
When the gamesmaster opened the psyconductor to all involved, Joan and Pfeiffer were ready.
But they were not ready to find exact duplicates of themselves facing them across the table. The doppelgangers, of course, were not wearing cowls.
"First, Mesdames and messieurs, we draw the wager," said the dealer, who was not hooked in. The gamesmaster's thoughts were a neutral presence. "For each organ pledged, there will be three games consisting of three hands to a game," continued the dealer. "In the event that a player wins twice in succession, the third hand or game will not be played." His voice was an intrusion; it was harsh and cold and came from the outside where everything was hard and intractable.
How do they know what we look like? Pfeiffer asked, shaken by the hallucination induced by his opponents.