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

think about it.
Fox spoke the name of Hosaka's primary competitor in the gene game,
let it fall out naked, broke the protocol forbidding the use of proper
names.
They had to think about it, they said.
Fox gave them three days.
I took you to Barcelona a week before I took you to Vienna. I
remember you with your hair tucked back into a gray beret, your high Mongol
cheekbones reflected in the windows of ancient shops. Strolling down the
Ramblas to the Phoenician harbor, past the glass-roofed Mercado selling
oranges out of Africa. The old Ritz, warm in our room, dark, with all the
soft weight of Europe pulled over us like a quilt. I could enter you in your
sleep. You were always ready. Seeing your lips in a soft, round 0 of
surprise, your face about to sink into the thick, white pillow -- archaic
linen of the Ritz. Inside you I imagined all the neon, the crowds surging
around Shinjuku Station, wired electric night. You moved that way, rhythm of
a new age, dreamy and far from any nation's soil.
When we flew to Vienna, I installed you in Hiroshi's wife's favorite
hotel. Quiet, solid, the lobby tiled like a marble chessboard, with brass
elevators smelling of lemon oil and small cigars. It was easy to imagine her
there, the highlights on her riding boots reflected in polished marble, but
we knew she wouldn't be coming. along, not this trip.
She was off to some Rhinetand spa, and Hiroshi was in Vienna for a
conference. When Maas security flowed in to scan the hotel, you were out of
sight. Hiroshi arrived an hour later, alone.
Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who's come here to identify the
planet's dominant form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses.
What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged. The zaibatsus, Fox said,
the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The
structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it.
Corporation as life form. Not the Edge lecture again, I said.
Maas isn't like that, he said, ignoring me.
Maas was small, fast, ruthless. An atavism. Maas was all Edge.
I remember Fox talking about the nature of Hiroshi's Edge.
Radioactive nucleases, monoclonal antibodies, something to do with the
linkage of proteins, nucleotides ... Hot, Fox called them, hot proteins.
High-speed links. He said Hiroshi was a freak, the kind who shatters
paradigms, inverts a whole field of science, brings on the violent revision
of an entire body of knowledge. Basic patents, he said, his throat tight
with the sheer wealth of it, with the high, thin smell of tax-free millions
that clung to those two words. Hosaka wanted Hiroshi, but his Edge was
radical enough to worry them. They wanted him to work in isolation. I went
to Marrakech, to the old city, the Medina. I found a heroin lab that had
been converted to the extraction of pheromones. I bought it, with Hosaka's
money.
I walked the marketplace at Djemaa-el-Fna with a sweating Portuguese
businessman, discussing fluorescent lighting and the installation of
ventilated specimen cages. Beyond the city walls, the high Atlas.
Djemaa-el-Fna was thick with jugglers, dancers, storytellers, small boys
turning lathes with their feet, legless beggars with wooden bowls under