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

He flew on. His credit chip was a rectangle of black
mirror, edged with gold. People behind counters smiled when
they saw it, nodded. Doors opened, closed behind him. Wheels
left ferroconcrete, dnnks arrived, dinner was served.
[n Heathrow a vast chunk of memory detached itself from a
blank bowl of airport sky and fell on him. He vomited into a
blue plastic canister without breaking stride. When he amved
at the counter at the end of the comdor, he changed his
ticket.
He flew to Mexico.

And woke to the rattle of steel buckets on tile, wet swish of
brooms, a woman's body warm against his own
The room was a tall cave. Bare white plaster reflected
sound with too much clarity; somewhere beyond the clatter of
the maids in the morning courtyard was the pounding of surf.
The sheets bunched between his fingers were coarse cham-
bray, softened by countless washings.
He remembered sunlight through a broad expanse of tinted
window. An airport bar, Puerto Vallarta. He'd had to walk
twenty meters from the plane, eyes screwed shut against the
sun. He remembered a dead bat pressed flat as a dry leaf on
runway concrete.
He remembered riding a bus, a mountain road, and the reek
of internal combustion, the borders of the windshield plas-
tered with postcard holograms of blue and pink saints. He'd
ignored the steep scenery in favor of a sphere of pink lucite
and the jittery dance of mercury at its core. The knob crowned
the bent steel stem of the transmission lever, slightly larger
than a baseball. It had been cast around a crouching spider
blown from clear glass, hollow, half filled with quicksilver.
Mercury jumped and slid when the driver slapped the bus
through switchback curves, swayed and shivered in the straight-
aways. The knob was ridiculous, handmade, baleful; it was
there to welcome him back to Mexico.
Among the dozen~odd microsofts the Dutchman had given
him was one that would allow a limited fluency in Spanish,
but in Vallarta he'd fumbled behind his left ear and inserted a
dustplug instead, hiding the socket and plug beneath a square
of flesh-tone micropore. A passenger near the back of the bus
had a radio. A voice had periodically interrupted the brassy
pop to recite a kind of litany, strings of ten-digit figures,
the
day's winning numbers in the national lottery.
The woman beside him stirred in her sleep.
He raised himself on one elbow to look at her A stranger's
face, but not the one his life in hotels had taught him to
expect. He would have expected a routine beauty, bred out of
cheap elective surgery and the relentless Darwinism of fash-
ion, an archetype cooked down from the major media faces of