"M. John Harrison - Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

pursed his little lips judicially ' тАФ though this guy Billy is usually very acute, very dependable.' The
thought leading him nowhere, he shrugged, 'lie got it in Radio Bay, but he couldn't work out what it did.'
'Could you?'
'I didn't recognise the cutter's hand.' Uncle Zip spread his own hands and examined them. 'But I saw
through the cut in a day.' He was proud of his plump fingers and their clean, spatulate nails, as proud of
his touch as if he cut the genes directly, like a cobbler at a last. 'Right through and out the other side. It's
what you need all right: no trouble '
'Then why won't it work?'
'You should bring it back. Maybe I take another look.'
'It keeps asking me for Dr Haends.'
 SIX

In Dreams




At first you thought the Cray sisters were running themselves on some kind of one-shot cultivar. You
soon saw they took too much care of themselves to be doing that. Nevertheless, they were big, with that
sensual, more-alive-than-alive look a cultivar has because Its user just doesn't care what happens. They
had big, powerful behinds, over which they wore short black nylon skirts. They had big, short legs, with
calves tightened and moulded by a lifetime of four-inch heels. The big shoulders of their short-sleeved
white 'secretary' blouses were padded and flounced. Tattooed snakes curled and uncurled lazily around
their bare, fleshy biceps.
One day they came in the shop and Evie asked Tig Vesicle did he have a twink called Ed Chianese in
one of the tanks. This twink would be about yay tall (she indicated two inches taller than herself), with a
partly grown out peroxide Mohican and a couple of cheap tattoos. He would have been quite a muscular
guy, she said, at least before tank-life got to him.
'I never saw anyone like that,' Vesicle lied.
He was immediately full of terror. If you could help it, you did not lie to the Cray sisters. They did their
faces every morning with white pan-stick, and drew in wide red liplines, voluptuous, angry and
clown-like all at once. With these mouths they held the whole of Pierpoint Street to ransom. They had
innumerable soldiers, shadow boys in cultivars, cheap teenage punks with guns. Also, in their antique
briefcases, or big, soft leather purses, they each carried a Chambers reaction pistol. At first they seemed
like a mass of contradictions, bat you soon understood they weren't.
The truth was, this Chianese twink was Tig Vesicle's orly regular. Who went to a tank farm in the
upper 700s, Pierpoint? No one. The trade was all down at the other end, where you got any number of
investment bankers, also women whose favourite dog died ten years before, they never got over it. The
lunch trade was all down there, in the middle and low numbers. Without Chianese, who was twinking
three weeks at a time when he could afford it, Vesicle's business would be fucked. He would be out on
the street all day trying to move AbH and Earth speed to kids who were only interested in do-it-yourself
gene patches which they got from some guy across the halo called Uncle Zip.
The Crays gave Tig Vesicle a look designed to say, 'You lie on this occasion, you get broken down
for your rarer proteins.'
'Really,' he said.
Eventually Evie Cray shrugged.
 'You see a guy like that, we're the first to know,' she said. 'The first.'
She stared round the tank farm, with its bare grey floor and shoot-up posters peeling off the walls, and
gave Vesicle a contemptuous look. 'Jesus, Tig,' she said. 'Could you just make this place a little more
unwelcoming? Do you think you could do that?'