"Paul Di Filippo & Bruce Sterling - The Scabs Progress" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

immediate sharpening." Malvern pulled his slumbering weasel, Spike, from a lab
coat pocket and set it on his shoulder. The weaselтАФbiotechnically speaking, Spike
was mostly an ermineтАФimmediately became the nicest-looking thing about the
man. Spike's lustrous fur gave Malvern the dashing air of a Renaissance prince, if
you recalled that Renaissance princes were mostly unprincipled bush-league tyrants
who would poison anyone within reach.

Malvern ambled hungrily into the kitchen.

"How have you been, Malvern?" said Tupper brightly.

"I'm great, babe." Malvern pulled a clamp-topped German beer bottle from his
jacket. "You up for a nice warm brewski?"

"Don't drink that," Fearon warned his wife.
"Brewed it personally," said Malvern, hurt. "I'll just leave it here in case you change
your mind." Malvern plonked the heavy bottle onto the scarred Formica.

Raised a rich, self-assured, decorous girl, Tupper possessed the good breeding and
manners to tolerate Malvern's flagrant transgressive behavior. Fearon remembered
when he, too, had received adoring looks from TupperтАФas a bright idealist who
understood the true, liberating potential of biotech, an underground scholar who
bowed to none in his arcane mastery of plasmid vectors. Unlike Malvern, whose
scab popularity was mostly due to his lack of squeamishness.

Malvern was louche and farouche, so, as was his wont, he began looting Tupper's
kitchen fridge. "Liberty's gutters are crawling!" Malvern declaimed, fingersnapping a
bit to suit his with-it scab-rap. "It's a bug-crash of awesome proportions, and I urge
forthwith we reap some peptides from the meltdown."

"Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted," countered Fearon. He herded the
unmannerly scab back to the parlor.

With deft stabs of his carpalled fingertips, Fearon used the parlor wallscreen to
access Fusing NucleiтАФthe all-biomed news site favored by the happening hipsters of
scabdom.

Tupper, pillar of support that she was, soon slid in with a bounty of hotwired
snackfood. Instinctively, both men shared with their familiars, Fearon dropping
creamy tidbits to his pig while Malvern reached salty gobbets up and back to his
neck-hugging weasel.

Shoulder to shoulder on the parlor couch, Malvern and Fearon fixed their jittering
attention on the unfolding urban catastrophe.

The living pixels in the electrojelly cohered into the familiar image of Wet Willie,
FN's star business reporter. Wet Willie, dashingly clad in his customary splatterproof
trenchcoat, had framed himself in the shot of a residential Miami skyscraper. The
pastel Neo-Deco walls were sheathed in pearly slime. Wriggling like a nautch
dancer, the thick, undulating goo gleamed in Florida's Greenhouse sunlight. Local