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

ing behind him.
She rose, tried to tug some shape into the damp lapels of
her jacket, touched her hair, thought better of it, took a deep
breath, and crossed to the door. The receptionist's phrase had
prepared her for the only kind of link she knew, a simstim
signal routed via Bell Europa. She'd assumed she'd wear a
helmet studded with dermatrodes, that Virek would use a
passive viewer as a human camera.
But Virek's wealth was on another scale of magnitude
entirely.
As her fingers closed around the cool brass knob, it seemed
to squirm, sliding along a touch spectrum of texture and
temperature in the first second of contact.
Then it became metal again, green-painted iron, sweeping
out and down, along a line of perspective, an old railing she
grasped now in wonder.
A few drops of rain blew into her face.
Smell of rain and wet earth.
A confusion of small details, her own memory of a drunken
art school picnic warring with the perfection of Virek's
illusion.
Below her lay the unmistakable panorama of Barcelona,
smoke hazing the strange spires of the Church of the Sagrada
Familia. She caught the railing with her other hand as well,
fighting vertigo. She knew this place She was in the Guell
Park, Antonio Gaudi's tatty fairyland, on its barren rise be-
hind the center of the city. To her left, a giant lizard of
crazy-quilt ceramic was frozen in midslide down a ramp of
rough stone. Its fountain-grin watered a bed of tired flowers.
"You are disoriented. Please forgive me."
Josef Virek was perched below her on one of the park's
serpentine benches, his wide shoulders hunched in a soft
topeoat. His features had been vaguely familiar to her all her
she remembered, for some reason, a photograph of
life. Now
Virek and the king of England. He smiled at her. His head
was large and beautifully shaped beneath a brush of stiff dark
gray hair. His nostrils were permanently flared, as though he
sniffed invisible winds of art and commerce. His eyes, very
large behind the round, rimless glasses that were a trademark,
were pale blue and strangely soft.
"Please." He patted the bench's random mosaic of shat-
ftered pottery with a narrow hand. "You must forgive my
reliance on technology. I have been confined for over a
decade to a vat. In some hideous industrial suburb of Stock-
holm. Or perhaps of hell. I am not a well man, Marly. Sit
beside me."
Taking a deep breath, she descended the stone steps and
crossed the cobbles "Herr Virek," she said, "I saw you
lecture in Munich, two years ago. A critique of Faessler and