"James Patrick Kelly - Ninety Percent of Everything" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

****
We were met at the truck by two attendants. On closer inspection I could see
their uniforms weren't actually a solid blue but rather a pattern: Nguyen
O'Hara's dense calligraphic signature repeated over and over again.
"Anything to report?" said Nguyen.
"Not really. Somebody dropped chocolate on the carpet in the billiards
room. Nothing the cleanbots couldn't take care of."
"Very good. I'll be in conference here the rest of the day, so dismiss
the tour staff. We'll open tomorrow at ten. Friday we move to the site."
He led us up the stairs. The risers were pix on which messages flashed
sequentially, so that Nguyen's canned greeting cascaded down at us like a
waterfall of words:
_Welcome to Laputa_
_Keep in mind_
_You are entering_
_a private residence._
_Food, drink and_
_photography_
_are prohibited._
_Your visit will last_
_about an hour._
_Please note:_
_there are no_
_restrooms_
"What kind of house has no bathrooms?" I said.
Nguyen paused at the open hatch and flicked several switches, turning
the message off and lights on inside the lifthouse. "Oh, that's only to
discourage the tourists. Water is a kilogram per liter; it's the biggest part
of the weight budget. Besides, when we're over a city we can't void waste to
the air." He ushered us up the circular stairs.
****
I've never been able to get past my first impression of Laputa: an odd
combination of a yacht and my Aunt Galadriel's house. A yacht in that, with
the exception of a few moveable pieces, all the furniture and chairs were
built in. There were no open shelves; what was not stored in the beautifully
joined cupboards was battened down behind transparent sheets of nuglass.
Aunt Galadriel lived by herself; in the days before cleanbots, she'd
kept a house that was sterile enough to recombine DNA in. Aunt Lindsay and
Aunt Kym's house, where I grew up, is a mess, so I always felt a vague sense
of guilt when I visited Aunt Galadriel, as if by the mere act of breathing I
might be disrupting an order she had taken years of hard labor to impose on
her environment.
Aunt Galadriel would have approved of the fastidious housekeeping at
Laputa. It was the kind of place a man with a weakness for yellow suits would
have to live in.
****
Laputa had three donut-shaped levels that surrounded a central utility core.
In the core were plumbing, water, and waste storage, heating and ventilation,
the VTEMF generator, the homebrain and a 300 kilowatt Pons power plant that
provided electricity for the living quarters and heated the helium in the