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

most was syndicated from out in the halo and featured a girl called Moaner, who was supposed to live in
a corporate enclave somewhere on Motel Splendido. The story was, her husband was always away
(though in fact he often arrived back unexpectedly with five of his business associates, who included
another woman). Moaner wore short pink latex skirts with tube tops and little white socks. She had a
little clean mat of pubic hair. She was bored, the narrative went; she was agile and spoilt. Vesicle
preferred her to do ordinary things, like painting her toenails naked, or trying to look over her shoulder at
herself in a mirror. One thing with Moaner was this: even though she was a clone, her body looked real.
She wasn't any kind of rebuild. They advertised her as 'never been to the tailor' and lie could believe that.
The other thing about her was that she was aware of you, even though she didn't know you were
there.
Could you get behind that paradox? Vesicle believed you could. If he once understood it, it would tell
him something about the universe or, equally important, about human beings. He felt as if she knew he
was there. She isn't a porn star! he would tell himself.
He was dreaming this cheap, doomed, New Man dream тАФ while Moaner herself yawned and tried
on a pair of brand new yellow Mickey Mouse shorts with big buttons and matching suspenders тАФ when
the door of the tank farm banged open, letting in a gust of cold grey wind from the street, along with six
or seven tiny kids. They had short black hair and tight, furious Asian faces. Snow was melting on the
shoulders of their black rainslickers. The oldest was maybe eight, with lightning flashes etched into the
short hair above her ears and a Nagasaki Hi-Lite Autoloader clutched in both hands. They spread out
and began going through the tank cubicles as if they were looking for something, shouting and gabbling in
gluey voices and pulling out the power cables so the tanks went on to emergency wake-up call.
'Hey!' said Tig Vesicle.
 They stopped what they were doing and went quiet. The oldest kid shrieked and gesticulated at them.
They looked warily from her to Vesicle and back again, then went on rummaging among the cubicles тАФ
where, finding a prybar, they began trying to lever the lid off Tank Seven. The girl, meanwhile, came up
and stood in front of Vesicle. She was perhaps half his height. Caf├й ├йlectrique had already rotted her
little uneven teeth. She was wired until her eyes bulged. Her wrists trembled with the weight of the
Nagasaki; but she managed to raise it until its aimspot wavered somewhere around his diaphragm, then
said something like:
'Djoo-an dug fortie? Ugh?'
She sounded as if she was eating the words as fast as she spoke them. Vesicle stared down at her.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm not sure what you're saying.'
This seemed to anger her unreasonably. 'Fortie!' she shrieked.
Casting around for a reply, Vesicle remembered something the Chianese twink once told him. It was
part of some anecdote from when the twink still had a life, blah, blah, blah, they all pretended to
remember that. Vesicle, bored by the story but intrigued by the extremes of experience you could pack
into a single statement, had memorised it gleefully. He spent a moment summoning the exact offhand
gesture with which Chianese had accompanied the words, then looked down at the girl and said:
'I'm so scared I don't know whether to laugh or shit.'
Her eyes bulged further. He could see that she was hauling back on the trigger of the Hi-Lite. He
opened his mouth, wondering what he could say to stem this new rage, but it was too late to say anything
at all. There was a huge explosion which, oddly enough, seemed to come from somewhere near the
street door. The girl's eyes bulged further, then jumped out of her head to the full length of her optic
nerve. In the same instant, her head evaporated into a kind of greyish-red slurry. Vesicle stumbled
backwards, rather covered with this stuff, and fell on his back, wondering what was happening.
It was this:
One-shot cultivars were queuing outside the tank farm in the Pierpoint night. Ten or a dozen of them
stood about in the falling snow, stamping their feet and cocking their short reaction guns. They wore
stained leather trousers, laced together over a three-inch gap all the way down the outside leg, and
leather bolero vests. Their breath condensed like the breath of great dependable animals in the freezing