"Barbara Hambly - Windrose 2 - The Silicon Mage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Francisco, New York, Tokyo, London, or anywhere else she could read about. One or two newspapers
had come up with facile sociological theories about economic anxiety and shifts in demographics.
They might even have been right. But going downstairs to visit her friend Ruth after one such
spell, Joanna had seen the painting on which Ruth had spent weeks, gessoed over with great,
impatient smears of hardening white.
That was still not proof that the life energy of the world was being intermittently drained
and bledтАФnot fatally, or at least not intrinsically fatallyтАФacross the Void, to create electricity
to power a computer in a world which had neither.
In the last four weeks, Joanna had read a great deal about that computer in Suraklin's files.
She nosed the Mustang up the freeway on ramp, one tedious car length at a time, and into the
sluggish flow of traffic. Whatever air conditioning system the car had once possessed had bitten
the big one years ago; she relied on what Ruth called four eighty air conditioning; one opened all
four windows and drove at eighty. It worked when one wasn't trying to get down the 101 at five
fifteen on a Friday afternoon with everybody else in the southern half of the state of California.
At least she was inbound, toward L.A. instead of away from it; the traffic was moving at about two
yards per hour, but moving. The outbound lanes were stopped in both directions as far as the eye
could see.
The slowness gave her time to think about tonight, and with thought came fear.
She'd been living with fear for over a month now and she hadn't gotten used to it yet. The
abnormally heavy traffic reminded her again that it was Friday, making her heart triphammer with
dread. There was a good chance that it would be tonight...
She and Antryg Windrose had guessed that Suraklin had a computer whose electrical/magical
power relays fed on life, hidden in some fortress, some cavern, or some other hideaway in the
Empire of Ferryth, the world on the other side of the Void, before she'd ever tapped into
Suraklin's files. For months Gary had been programming them into the big Cray mainframe at San
Serano, while he'd worked at stealing by modem powered computer scam an experimental mainframe of
artificial intelligence proportions to set up on the other side of the Void. It was ultimately
ironic, she thought wryly, that, having stolen via computer, Gary's personality, his self, should
now be nothing more than a series of programs logged in a computer's electronic guts.


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She'd seen that program. Everything about GaryтАФhis likes and dislikes, his intricate network
of computer tapped bank accounts, the affairs he'd carried on with other women while he'd sworn
his undying love to her, and the details of the particularly nasty variety of pornography he'd
favoredтАФhad all been neatly digitalized. In other files, she'd found the details of the old
Archmage Salteris' personality and what had been that of the poor imbecilic Emperor of Ferryth,
whose shell still stumbled drooling through the palace at Angelshand while his mad son ruled the
Empire.
And with them was the personality, the memories, and the knowledge of the man who had stolen
and inhabited the bodies and minds of the Emperor, of Salteris, and of Gary in turnтАФthe evil old
man whose speech patterns and gestures Gary occasionally used and whose amber cat glint eyes had
watched her so intently today, the wizard Suraklin, whom all had once called the Dark Mage.
The computer was his ticket to eternity. Joanna knew it existed and knew he was programming
his personality, petrifying it in everlasting silicon, so that he would at last live forever. The
drain on the life energies of her own world and of the world in which the computer itself was
situatedтАФthe world across the VoidтАФwasn't strong enough to kill. It would only maim, in a way for
which there was no word, forever.