"Gibson, William- CyberPunk 1- Neuromancer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

"You don't know me, sister."
"You're okay, Case. What got you, it's just called bad luck." "How about him? He okay, Molly?" The robot crab moved toward them, picking its way over the waves of gravel. Its bronze carapace might have been a thousand years old. When it was within a meter of her boots, it fired a burst of light, then froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained. "What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet ass." The crab had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked it with a smooth precision, the silver boot-tip clanging on the carapace. The thing fell on its back, but the bronze limbs soon righted it.
Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry of the gravel waves with the toes of his shoes. He began to search his pockets for cigarettes. "In your shirt," she said. "You want to answer my question?" He fished a wrinkled Yeheyuan from the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab of German steel that looked as though it belonged on an op-erating table.
"Well, I'll tell you, the man's definitely on to something. He's got big money now, and he's never had it before, and he gets more all the time." Case noticed a certain tension around her mouth. "Or maybe, maybe something's on to him...." She shrugged.
"What's that mean?"
"I don't know, exactly. I know I don't know who or what we're really working for."
He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday morning, he'd gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours . Then he'd taken a long and pointless walk along the port's security perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the chain link. If she'd followed him, she'd done a good job of it. He'd avoided Night City. He'd waited in the coffin for Ar-mitage's call. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this girl with a gymnast's body and conjurer's hands. "If you'll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to meet you." The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the clinic without waiting to see if Case would follow.
Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine.
Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.
Voices.
Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given....
Hold still. Don't move.
And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chain link and the prison of the skull.
Goddamn don't you move.
Where the sky faded from hissing static to the non color of the matrix, and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars. "Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!"
She was straddling his chest, a blue plastic syrette in one hand. "You don't lie still, I'll slit your fucking throat. You're still full of endorphin inhibitors."
He woke and found her stretched beside him in the dark. His neck was brittle, made of twigs. There was a steady pulse of pain midway down his spine. Images formed and reformed: a flickering montage of the Sprawl's towers and ragged Fuller domes, dim figures moving toward him in the shade beneath a bridge or overpass....
"Case? It's Wednesday, Case." She moved, rolling over, reaching across him. A breast brushed his upper arm. He heard her tear the foil seal from a bottle of water and drink. "Here." She put the bottle in his hand. "I can see in the dark, Case.
Micro channel image-amps in my glasses."
"My back hurts."
"That's where they replaced your fluid. Changed your blood too. Blood 'cause you got a new pancreas thrown into the deal. And some new tissue patched into your liver. The nerve stuff I dun no. Lot of injections. They didn't have to open anything up for the main show." She settled back beside him. "It's 2:43:12 AM, Case. Got a readout chipped into my optic nerve." He sat up and tried to sip from the bottle. Gagged, coughed, lukewarm water spraying his chest and thighs. "I gotta punch deck, ' he heard himself say. He was groping for his clothes. "I gotta know...."
She laughed. Small strong hands gripped his upper arms. "Sorry, hotshot. Eight day wait. Your nervous system would fall out on the floor if you jacked in now. Doctor's orders. Besides, they figure it worked. Check you in a day or so." He lay down again.
"Where are we?"
"Home. Cheap Hotel."
"Where's Armitage?"
"Hilton, selling beads to the natives or something. We're out of here soon, man. Amsterdam, Paris, then back to the Sprawl." She touched his shoulder. "Roll over. I give a good massage."
He lay on his stomach, arms stretched forward, tips of his fingers against the walls of the coffin. She settled over the small of his back, kneeling on the temper foam, the leather jeans cool against his skin. Her fingers brushed his neck. "How come you're not at the Hilton?"
She answered him by reaching back, between his thighs and gently encircling his scrotum with thumb and forefinger. She rocked there for a minute in the dark, erect above him, her other hand on his neck. The leather of her jeans creaked softly with the movement. Case shifted, feeling himself harden against the temper foam.
His head throbbed, but the brittleness in his neck seemed to retreat. He raised himself on one elbow, rolled, sank back against the foam, pulling her down, licking her breasts, small hard nipples sliding wet across his cheek. He found the zip on the leather jeans and tugged it down.
"It's okay," she said, "I can see." Sound of the jeans peeling down. She struggled beside him until she could kick them away. She threw a leg across him and he touched her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted lenses. "Don't," she said, "finger-prints."
Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia. As she began to lower herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriv-ing and receding. She slid down around him and his back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, impaling herself, slipping down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips.
On Nisei, a thinner, weekday version of the crowd went through the motions of the dance. Waves of sound rolled from the arcades and pachinko parlors. Case glanced into the Chat and saw Zone watching over his girls in the warm, beer-smell-ing twilight. Ratz was tending bar.
"You seen Wage, Ratz?"
"Not tonight." Ratz made a point of raising an eyebrow at Molly.
"You see him, tell him I got his money."
"Luck changing, my artiste?"
"Too soon to tell."
"Well, I gotta see this guy," Case said, watching his re-flection in her glasses. "I got biz to cancel out of." "Armitage won't like it, I let you out of my sight." She stood beneath Deane's melting clock, hands on her hips. "The guy won't talk to me if you're there. Deane I don't give two shits about. He takes care of himself. But I got people who'll just go under if I walk out of Chiba cold. It's my people, you know?"
Her mouth hardened. She shook her head. "I got people in Singapore, Tokyo connections in Shinjuku and Asakuza, and they'll go down, understand?" he lied, his hand on the shoulder of her black jacket. "Five. Five minutes. By your clock, okay?"
"Not what I'm paid for."
"What you're paid for is one thing. Me letting some tight friends die because you're too literal about your instructions is something else."
"Bullshit. Tight friends my ass. You're going in there to check us out with your smuggler." She put a booted foot up on the dust-covered Kandinsky coffee table. "Ah, Case, sport, it does look as though your companion there is definitely armed, aside from having a fair amount of silicon in her head . What is this about, exactly?" Deane ' s ghostly cough seemed to hang in the air between them. "Hold on, Julie. Anyway, I'll be coming in alone." "You can be sure of that, old son. Wouldn't have it any other way."
"Okay," she said. "Go. But five Minutes. Any more and I'll come in and cool your tight friend permanently. And while you're at it, you try to figure something out." "What's that?"
"Why I'm doing you the favor." She turned and walked out, past the stacked white modules of preserved ginger. "Keeping stranger company than usual, Case?" asked Julie.
"Julie, she's gone. You wanna let me in? Please, Julie?"
The bolts worked. "Slowly, Case," said the voice. "Turn on the works, Julie, all the stuff in the desk," Case said, taking his place in the swivel chair. "It's on all the time," Deane said mildly, taking a gun from behind the exposed works of his old mechanical typewriter and aiming it carefully at Case. It was a belly gun, a magnum revolver with the barrel sawn down to a nub. The front of the trigger-guard had been cut away and the grips wrapped with what looked like old masking tape. Case thought it looked very strange in Dean's manicured pink hands. "Just taking care, you Understand. Nothing personal. Now tell me what you want." "I need a history lesson, Julie. And a go-to on somebody." "What's moving, old son'?" Deane's shirt was candy-striped cotton, the collar white and rigid, like porcelain. "Me, Julie. I'm leaving. Gone. But do me the favor, okay?"
"Go-to on whom, old son?"
"Gaijin name of Armitage, suite in the Hilton." Deane put the pistol down. "Sit still, Case." He tapped something out on a lap terminal. "It seems as though you know as much as my net does, Case. This gentleman seems to have a temporary arrangement with the Yakuza, and the sons of the neon chrysanthemum have ways of screening their allies from the likes of me. I wouldn't have it any other way. Now, history. You said history." He picked up the gun again, but didn't point it directly at Case. "What sort of history?" "The war. You in the war, Julie?"
"The war? What's there to know? Lasted three weeks."
"Screaming Fist."