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

"You dumbshit or what?" The man with the Peterbilt cap turned, catching Deke's Indo proleboy
denims, the brass chains at his wrists, for the first time. "Why don't you get your ass lost,
fucker. Nobody wants your kind in here." He turned back to the dogfight.

Bets were being made, being covered. The kickers were producing the hard stuff, the old stuff,
libertyheaded dollars and Roosevelt dimes from the stampand-coin stores, while more cautious
bettors slapped down antique paper dollars laminated in clear plastic. Through the haze came a
trio of red planes, flying in formation. Fokker D Vhs. The room fell silent. The Fokkers banked
majestically under the solar orb of a two-hundred-watt bulb.

The blue Spad dove out of nowhere. Two more plunged from the shadowy ceiling, following closely.
The kickers swore, and one chuckled. The formation broke wildly. One Fokker dove almost to the
felt, without losing the Spad on its tail. Furiously, it zigged and zagged across the green
flatlands but to no avail. At last it pulled up, the enemy hard after it, too steeply and stalled,


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too low to pull out in time. A stack of silver dimes was scooped up. The Fokkers were outnumbered
now. One had two Spads on its tail. A needle-spray of tracers tore past its cockpit. The Fokker
slip-turned right, banked into an Immelmann, and was behind one of its pursuers. It fired, and the
biplane fell, tumbling.

"Way to go, Tiny!" The kickers closed in around the table.

Deke was frozen with wonder. It felt like being born all over again.

Frank's Truck Stop was two miles out of town on the Commercial Vehicles Only route. Deke had
tagged it, out of idle habit, from the bus on the way in. Now he walked back between the traffic
and the concrete crash guards. Articulated trucks went slamming past, big eight-segmented jobs,
the wash of air each time threatening to blast him over. CVO stops were easy makes. When he
sauntered into Frank's, there was nobody to doubt that he'd come in off a big rig, and he was able
to browse the gift shop as slowly as he liked. The wire rack with the projective wetware wafers
was located between a stack of Korean cowboy shirts and a display for Fuzz Buster mudguards. A
pair of Oriental dragons twisted in the air over the rack, either fighting or fucking, he couldn't
tell which. The game he wanted was there: a wafer labeled SPADS&FOKKERS. It took him three seconds
to boost it and less time to slide the magnet which the cops in D.C. hadn't even bothered to
confiscate across the universal security strip. On the way out, he lifted two programming units
and a little Batang facilitator-remote that looked like an antique hearing aid.


He chose a highstack at random and fed the rental agent the line he'd used since his welfare
rights were yanked. Nobody ever checked up; the state just counted occupied rooms and paid.

The cubicle smelled faintly of urine, and someone had scrawled Hard Anarchy Liberation Front
slogans across the walls. Deke kicked trash out of a corner, sat down, back to the wall, and
ripped open the wafer pack.