"Gibson, William - New Rose Hotel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

I watched you dress; watched the swing of your dark, straight hair, how it
cut the air. Now Hosaka hunts me.
The coffins of New Rose are racked in recycled scaffolding, steel
pipes under bright enamel. Paint flakes away when I climb the ladder, falls
with each step as I follow the catwalk. My left hand counts off the coffin
hatches, their multilingual decals warning of fines levied for the loss of a
key. I look up as the jets rise out of Narita, passage home, distant now as
any moon. Fox was quick to see how we could use you, but not sharp enough to
credit you with ambition. But then he never lay all night with you on the
beach at Kamakura, never listened to your nightmares, never heard an entire
imagined childhood shift under those stars, shift and roll over, your
child's mouth opening to reveal some fresh past, and always the one, you
swore, that was really and finally the truth. I didn't care, holding your
hips while the sand cooled against your skin. Once you left me, ran back to
that beach saying you'd forgotten our key. I found it in the door and went
after you, to find you ankle-deep in surf, your smooth back rigid,
trembling; your eyes far away. You --couldn't talk. Shivering. Gone. Shaking
for different futures and better pasts. Sandii, you left me here.
You left me all your things. This gun. Your makeup, all the shadows
and blushes capped in plastic. Your Cray microcomputer, a gift from Fox,
with a shopping list you entered. Sometimes I play that back, watching each
item cross the little silver screen.
A freezer. A fermenter. An incubator. An electrophoresis system with
integrated agarose cell and transilluminator. A tissue embedder. A
high-performance liquid chromatograph. A flow cytometer. A
spectrophotometer. Four gross of borosilicate scintillation vials. A
microcentrifuge. And one DNA synthesizer, with in-built computer. Plus
software.
Expensive, Sandii, but then Hosaka was footing our bills. Later you
made them pay even more, but you were already gone.
Hiroshi drew up that list for you. In bed, probably. Hiroshi
Yomiuri. Maas Biolabs GmbH had him. Hosaka wanted him.
He was hot. Edge and lots of it. Fox followed genetic engineers the
way a fan follows players in a favorite game. Fox wanted Hiroshi so bad he
could taste it.
He'd sent me up to Frankfurt three times before you turned up, just
to have a look-see at Hiroshi. Not to make a pass or even to give him a wink
and a nod. Just to watch.
Hiroshi showed all the signs of having settled in. He'd found a
German girl with a taste for conservative loden and riding boots polished
the shade of a fresh chestnut. He'd bought a renovated town house on just
the right square. He'd taken up fencing and given up kendo.
And everywhere the Maas security teams, smooth and heavy, a rich,
clear syrup of surveillance. I came back and told Fox we'd never touch him.
You touched him for us, Sandii. You touched him just right.
Our Hosaka contacts were like specialized cells protecting the
parent organism. We were mutagens, Fox and I, dubious agents adrift on the
dark side of the intercorporate sea.
When we had you in place in Vienna, we offered them Hiroshi. They
didn't even blink. Dead calm in an LA hotel room. They said they had to