"Gibson, William - Count Zero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

COUNT ZERO

William Gibson
1986



Count Zero

THEY sent A SLAMHOUND on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted
it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up
with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scram-
bling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs
and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized
hexogene and flaked TNT.
He didn't see it coming. The last he saw of India was the
pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.
Because he had a good agent, he had a good contract.
Because he had a good contract, he was in Singapore an hour
after the explosion. Most of him, anyway The Dutch surgeon
liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of
Turner hadn't made it out of Palam International on that first
flight and had to spend the night there in a shed, in a support
vat
It took the Dutchman and his team three months to put
Turner together again. They cloned a square meter of skin for
him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysac-
charides They bought eyes and genitals on the open market
The eyes were green.
He spent most of those three months in a ROM-generated
simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood of
the previous century. The Dutchman's visits were gray dawn
dreams, nightmares that faded as the sky lightened beyond his
secondfloor bedroom window You could smell the lilacs,
late at night. He read Conan Doyle by the light of a sixty-watt
bulb behind a parchment shade printed with clipper ships He
masturbated in the smell of clean cotton sheets and thought
about cheerleaders. The Dutchman opened a door in his back
brain and came strolling in to ask questions, but in the
morning his mother called him down to Wheaties, eggs and
bacon, coffee with milk and sugar.
And one morning he woke in a strange bed, the Dutchman
standing beside a window spilling tropical green and a sun-
light that hurt his eyes. "You can go home now, Turner
We're done with you You're good as new

He was good as new. How good was that? He didn't know.
He took the things the Dutchman gave him and flew out of
Singapore Home was the next airport Hyatt.
And the next. And ever was.