"Ellen Datlow - SciFiction Originals vol.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Datlow Ellen)

Not that a new arm had been all that small to him. Two years of living on the cheap, saving the money he got from
playing errand boy and selling guidebooks and magazines to the tourists, no luxuries, not even a piss-quality beer on a
Saturday night, just so he'd have the cash for old Sibelius at the Universal Prosthesis Clinic. UPC did a cash-only
business-strictly used paper in a used brown envelope, don't want that old taxman coming around, do we? Nosir.
Straight cash got you the straight goods.
You wouldn't have thought so looking at UPC's shabby storefront. You wouldn't have even thought to ask, which
was just as well, since if you had to ask you'd never know. But if you were the right kind, someone more interested in
possibilities than what you could have right now-i.e., the stars rather than the gutter-and you were both willing to
work and open to suggestion, some of the right things could happen. Because you'd know the right way to make them
happen. You'd know that putting some extra in that brown envelope and staying awake through old lady Sibelius's
sales patter-Come on in, we fix you up cheap, just don't ask too many questions about where the parts are from. We do
arms, we do legs, we even do whole exoskeletons. Don't matter how you come in, you gonna be walking out, walking
tall and proud. Doctor Sibelius guarantees and that's for life, my man-meant you'd get something higher-grade than the
stuff Sibelius and her partners jury-rigged for the run-of-the-mill blowfish. One more good reason to get above
yourself.
Of course, until you actually did get above yourself, until you were actually up and out of the gutter, it was best to
exercise discretion. Especially in this neighborhood, when it was starting to get dark.
j

SKIN MUSIC screamed the old-school neon sign on the front of the tattoo parlor. Just below, one of the artists was
hanging in the open doorway blowing garish-colored smoke rings. She was new; the ink in her face morphed from
Valkyrie-style enhancements to Snow Queen to Snow Beast. She eyed Danny with the bold,
I-can-take-you-in-a-fight-or-I-can-take-you-in-bed-your-call attitude endemic in those under the age of twenty. Or
maybe that was just the tune her skin music was playing, he thought, giving her a self-possessed smile in return. She
was staring at his face. Didn't even notice his arm except in passing, the way you never notice anyone's limbs if they
have all of them. He made a point of pausing to read the plain old painted sign on the shop next door (TRADER
VIC'S-YES WE R OPEN) by way of showing her that he was busy, thanks, some other time maybe. A prior commitment
was more palatable than outright rejection; he knew that one firsthand. In lieu of pulling a thorn out of a lion's paw, it
was the sort of extended courtesy that might come in handy. But even if it didn't, it wasn't like it cost you anything.
The tattoo artist crushed her homemade on the sidewalk as he went into Trader Vic's. As usual, Vic herself was
behind the high counter at the far end of the store, looking regal as she flicked a finger at the flatscreen in front of her.
She was dark-skinned and heavily-built, no little slip of a thing but solid and strong in a grey Athletic Club of Overland
Park sweatshirt. Trader Vic, as she styled herself, was the real deal because, unlike the restaurateur who had launched
a thousand mai tais, she made trades, not drinks. Need something, but suffering from financial embarrassment? Not to
worry, Trader Vic liked to say, she had a thousand thousand contacts reachable via a touch on her flatscreen, and
millions more reachable by two touches. Somewhere among them was the person who had what you wanted and might
be in the mood to make a deal for it, a trade between the two of you. Or it could turn into a three-way dance, or
four-way, or you might end up getting plugged into a complex network of give and take, something that would be an
impossible tangle for anyone but Trader Vic, who could keep it all straight in her mind no matter which angle she came
at it from. You might have thought it was just good software and record-keeping so meticulous as to be anal, but that
was just backup for the real trading machine, the one between Vic's ears.
"Hey yo," she said with a big smile. "Something new has been added."
He waved at her with the arm and did bodybuilder poses with it as he approached the counter. Today she had
rented some of her unneeded floor space to the tattoo parlor and some to the market on the other side-boxes of
animation inks faced crates of olive oil, fish paste, fortified wheat germ, and shell macaroni.
"Like they say on the late show, checkiddout, checkiddout." He stretched the arm high over his head and made a
buzzing noise as he lowered his hand onto the counter next to her monitor for a five-point landing on the fingers. "The
Eagle is in da house and things can only get better."
"Nostalgia sure ain't what it used to be." She tried a soul handshake on him, bumped his knuckles with her own,
slapped him high and low five, and then got him in an arm wrestling grip.