"Kathleen Ann Goonan - Nanotech 04 - Light Music" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

thoughts swelled, willing themselves to take control once again.
The effort was like a wave, and passed quickly.
A wealth of titles washed through the CowboyтАЩs mind, all aspects
of himself. Crescent City Shorty, for he had the short form of the
city within him. The radioтАж something about radio was so
important to something within him.
Something?? railed Peabody silently. Me, damn you !
Crescent City Radio Cowboy Shorty smiled, spun his pistols, and
stuck them in the holsters. He could get used to this.
He strode down the corridor. Other folks needed help.


An Old Beginning

Hours after the initial attack, Dania crept down the
north-northwest corridor of the fifty-third level of Crescent City,
leaning into the hot wind that swept through the wide-open
hallway. Only shimmering nets spun of spidersteel kept people and
objects from plunging into the heaving Caribbean Sea, for this knob
was cantilevered out over black ocean lit with explosions.
тАЬIs it this ? Is it this ?тАЭ she muttered, touching as she passed ovals
of color with her right palm. None of them, apparently, were this ,
for she kept weaving across the corridor. Her long hair was wild
and matted. Her eyes were fixed and staring. She was naked, and
across her body pulsed tiny pictures. Her clothes had been ripped
from her by one of the pirates before she knocked him out with the
taser she managed to grab from him.
She sank to the floor and rolled into a spidersteel web, and it
bulged out into the air. She watched acrid clouds, lit every minute
or so by new explosions, for quite a while. She closed her eyes and
tried to think. She had to think or die.
As she lay wrapped in the soothing spidersteel, a younger Dania
walked through her mind.
With excitement and trust and far too little fear that younger self,
so many years ago, had entered a certain room in the younger
Crescent City. There she lay in the translucent hammock which
grew around her, and surrendered her brain cells in layers to the
city itself, to the community effort. Every bit of information about
the old Dania Cooper was replicated and saved.
 A new self, previously chosen by her, invaded her body,
realigning the lineaments of the frail stuff of personality in
accordance with her true potential, which had gone awry because of
her motherтАЩs habit of drinking several gin and tonics daily while she
was pregnant. New chemistries, slightly askew, promised a greater
capacity for learning. The pure information of twentieth- and
twenty-first-century thought were laid down. They were
transparent to her consciousness when she finally opened her eyes
and said, тАЬDamn, what a headache,тАЭ rolled out of the cocoon, and
lay gazing at the silvery ocean for a long time, surprised at the
pain. She walked on her knees across the floor and pulled herself