"George Alec Effinger - Marid 3 - The Exile Kiss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

pain, but I didn't want to find out what the goon would do if I tried to reach inside my robe. It wouldn't have cheered
me up to hear that things would soon get a lot worse before they got better.
After what seemed like an hour of driving, the limou-sine came to a stop. I didn't know where we were. I looked at
Hajjar's goon and said, "What's going on?"
"Shut up," the goon informed me.
Hajjar got out of the car and held the door open for Papa. I climbed out after him. We were standing beside some
buildings made of corrugated metal, looking at a private suborbital shuttle across a broad concrete apron, its running
lights flashing but its three giant thrusters cool and quiet. If this was the main airfield, then we were about thirty miles
north of the city. I'd never been there before.
I was getting worried, but Papa still had a calm look on his face. Hajjar pulled me aside. "Got your phone on you,
Audran?" he said quietly.
"Yeah," I said. I always wear it on my belt.
"Let me use it a minute, okay?"
I unclipped my phone and handed it to Hajjar. He grinned at me, dropped the phone to the pavement, and stomped
it into tiny broken pieces. "Thanks," he said.
"The fuck is going on?" I shouted, grabbing him by the arm.
Hajjar just looked at me, amused. Then his goon grabbed me and pinned both of my arms behind my back. "We're
going to get on that shuttle," he said. "There's a qadi who has something to tell the both of you."
We were taken aboard the suborbital and made to take seats in an otherwise empty front cabin. Hajjar sat beside
me, and his goon sat beside Friedlander Bey. "We have a right to know where you're taking us," I said. тАЮ Hajjar
examined his fingernails, pretending indiffer-ence. "Tell you the truth," he said, gazing out the window, "I don't
actually know where you're going. The qadi may tell you that when he reads you the verdict."
"Verdict?" I cried. "What verdict?"
"Oh," said Hajjar with an evil grin, "haven't you fig-ured it out? You and Papa are on trial. The qadi will decide
you're guilty while you're being deported. Doing it this way saves the legal system a lot of time and money. I
should've let you lass the ground good-bye, Audran, be-cause you're never going to see the city again!"
2
Honey Pilar is the most desirable woman in the world. Ask anybody. Ask the ancient, wrin-kled imam of the
Shimaal Mosque, and he'll tell you "Honey Filar, no question about it." She has long, pale haii, liquid green eyes, and
the most awe-inspiring body known to anthropological science. Fortunately, she's at-tainable. What she does for a
living is record personality modules of herself during sex play. There are Brigitte Stahlhelm and other stars in the
sex-moddy industry, but none of them come close to delivering the super-light-speed eroticism of Honey Pilar.
A few times, just for variety, I told Yasmin that I wanted to wear one of Honey's moddies. Yasmin would grin and
take over the active role, and I'd lie back and experience what it felt like to be a hungry, furiously re-sponsive woman. If
nothing else, the moddy trade has helped a lot of people get some insight into what makes the eight opposite sexes
tick.
After we'd finished jamming, I'd keep Honey's moddy chipped in for a while. Honey's afterglow was just as
phe-nomenal as her orgasms. Without the moddy, I might have rolled over and drifted off to sleep. With it, I curled up
close to Yasmin, closed my eyes, and just bathed in physical and emotional well-being. The only other thing I can
compare it to is a nice shot of morphine. The way the morphine makes you feel after you're done throwing up, I
mean.
That's just how I felt when I opened my eyes. I didn't have any memory of supersonic sex, so I assumed that
somewhere along the line I'd run into a friendly pharma-ceutical or two. My eyelids seemed stuck together, and when I
tried to rub the gunk out of them, my arm wouldn't work. It felt like a phony arm made out of Styro-foam or something,
and it didn't want to do anything but flop around on the sand next to me.
Okay, I thought, I'm going to have to sort all this out in a minute or two. I forgot about my eyes and sunk back into
delicious lethargy. Someday I wanted to meet the guy who invented lethargy, because I now believed he hadn't gotten
enough credit from the world at large. This was exactly how I wanted to spend the rest of my life, and until somebody
came up with a reason why I couldn't, I was just going to lie there in the dark and play with my floppy arm.
I was lying with my back on the earth, and my mind was floating in Heaven somewhere, and the dividing line