"William Gibson & Michael Swanwick - Dogfight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson William)

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Michael SWANWICK and William GIBSON
Dogfight
[from LIB.RU]



He meant to keep on going, right down to Florida. Work passage on a gunrunner, maybe wind up
conscripted into some ratass rebel army down in the war zone. Or maybe, with that ticket good as
long as he didn't stop riding, he'd just never get off Greyhound's Flying Dutchman. He grinned at
his faint reflection in cold, greasy glass while the downtown lights of Norfolk slid past, the bus
swaying on tired shocks as the driver slung it around a final corner. They shuddered to a halt in
the terminal lot, concrete lit gray and harsh like a prison exercise yard. But Deke was watching
himself starve, maybe in some snowstorm out of Oswego, with his cheek pressed up against that same
bus window, and seeing his remains swept out at the next stop by a muttering old man in faded
coveralls. One way or the other, he decided, it didn't mean shit to him. Except his legs seemed to
have died already. And the driver called a twenty-minute stopover Tidewater Station, Virginia. It
was an old cinder-block building with two entrances to each rest room, holdover from the previous
century.

Legs like wood, he made a halfhearted attempt at ghosting the notions counter, but the black girl
behind it was alert, guarding the sparse contents of the old glass case as though her ass depended
on it. Probably does, Deke thought, turning away. Opposite the washrooms, an open doorway offered
GAMES, the word flickering feebly in biofluorescent plastic. He could see a crowd of the local
kickers clustered around a pool table. Aimless, his boredom following him like a cloud, he stuck
his head in. And saw a biplane, wings no longer than his thumb, blossom bright orange flame.
Corkscrewing, trailing smoke, it vanished the instant it struck the green-felt field of the table.

"Tha's right, Tiny," a kicker bellowed, "you take that sumbitch!"

"Hey," Deke said. "What's going on?" The nearest kicker was a bean pole with a black mesh
Peterbilt cap. "Tiny's defending the Max," he said, not taking his eyes from the table.

"Oh, yeah? What's that?" But even as he asked, he saw it: a blue enamel medal shaped like a
Maltese cross, the slogan Pour le Merite divided among its arms.

The Blue Max rested on the edge of the table, directly before a vast and perfectly immobile bulk
wedged into a fragile-looking chrome-tube chair. The man's khaki work shirt would have hung on
Deke like the folds of a sail, but it bulged across that bloated torso so tautly that the buttons
threatened to tear away at any instant. Deke thought of southern troopers he'd seen on his way
down; of that weird, gut-heavy endotype balanced on gangly legs that looked like they'd been
borrowed from some other body. Tiny might look like that if he stood, but on a larger scale a
forty-inch jeans inseam that would need a woven-steel waistband to support all those pounds of
swollen gut. If Tiny were ever to stand at all for now Deke saw that that shiny frame was actually
a wheelchair. There was something disturbingly childlike about the man's face, an appalling
suggestion of youth and even beauty in features almost buried in fold and jowl. Embarrassed, Deke
looked away. The other man, the one standing across the table from Tiny, had bushy sideburns and a
thin mouth. He seemed to be trying to push something with his eyes, wrinkles of concentration
spreading from the corners....