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

'OK, tell me where this Billy Anker guy is.' She laughed, and, mimicking the tailor's manner, added,
'Also his present ambitions.'
Uncle Zip laughed too. Then he let his face go expressionless.
'You waited too long for that free offer,' he informed her. 'I changed my mind about that.'
He was sitting on a stool in his front room above the shop. He had on a short-sleeve sailor suit and
hat. White canvas trousers clung tight to bursting over his spread thighs. On each thigh he had a daughter
sitting, plump red-faced little girls with blue eyes, shiny cheeks and blonde ringlets, caught as if in a still
picture, laughing and reaching for his hat. All the flesh in this picture was lively and varnished. All the
colours were pushed and rich. Uncle Zip's fat arms curved around his daughters, his hands placed in the
small of each back as if they were the bellows-ends of his accordion. Behind him, the room was
lacquered red and green, and there were shelves on which he had arranged his collections of polished
motorcycle parts and other kitschy things from the history of Earth. Whatever you saw in Uncle Zip's
house, he never let you see his wife, or gave you one thin glimpse of the tools of his trade. 'As to where
the guy is,' he said, 'this is where you go . . . '
He gave her the name of a system, and a planet.
'It surveys as 3-alpha-Ferris VII. The locals тАФ which there aren't many of them тАФ call it Redline.'
'But that's in тАФ '
' тАФ Radio Bay.' He shrugged. 'Nothing comes easy in this world, kid. You got to decide how much
you want what you want.'
Seria Mau cut him off.
'Goodbye, Uncle Zip,' she said, and left him there with his expensive family and his cheap rhetoric.
Two or three days later, the K-ship White Cat, registered as a freebooter out of Venusport, New
Sol, quit the Motel Splendido parking orbit and slipped away into the long night of ths halo. She had
loaded fuel and ordnance. After port authority inspection she had accepted minor hull maintenance, and
paid the scandalous tax upon it. She had paid her dues. At the last moment, for reasons her captain
barely understood, she had taken on payload too: a team of corporate exogeologists and their
equipment, headed towards Suntory IV. For the first time in a year, the lights were on in the human
quarters of the ship. The shadow operators mapped and mowed. They hung in corners, whispering and
clasping their hands in a kind of bony delight.
What were they? They were algorithms with a life of their own. You found them in vacuum ships like
the White Cat, in cities, wherever people were. They did the work. Had they always been there in the
galaxy, waiting for human beings to take residence? Aliens who had uploaded themselves into empty
space? Ancient computer programmes dispossessed by their own hardware, to roam about, half lost, half
useful, hoping for someone to look after? In just a few a hundred years they had got inside the machinery
of things. Nothing worked without them. They could even run on biological tissue, as shadow boys full of
crime and beauty aid inexplicable motives. They could, if they wanted, they sometimes whispered to
Seria Mau, run on valves.
 NINE

This Is Your Wake-up Call




Tig Vesicle ran a tank farm, but he didn't do that stuff himself, anymore than he would have filled his arm
with AbH. How he looked at it was this: his life was crap, but it was a life. So the kind of porn he liked
to watch was ordinary, cheap, unimmersive, holographic stuff. It was often advertised as intrusion-porn.
The fantasy of it was: some woman's room would get fitted with microcameras without her knowledge.
You could watch her do anything, though things would usually end with some cultivar тАФ all tusks, prick
the size of a horse тАФ finding her in the shower. Vesicle often turned that part off. The show he watched