"James Patrick Kelly - The Prisoner of Chillon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

safer than satellite communications. Once it had printed out Django's
hardcopy, the system erased all records of the transferred information. Even
so, the message was encrypted, and Django had to enter it into his data cuff
to find out what it said.
"What is this?" He replayed it and I watched, fascinated, as the words
scrolled along the cuff's tiny display: "Lake Leman lies by Chillon's walls: /
A thousand feet in depth below / Its massy waters meet and flow; / Thus much
the fathom-line was sent / From Chillon's snow-white battlement..."
"It's called poetry, Django."
"I know what it's called! I want to know what the hell this has to do
with my drop. Half the world wants to chop my plug off and this dumbscut sends
me poetry." His face had turned as dark as beaujolais nouveau. "Where the hell
am I supposed to go?"
"Would you shut up for a minute?" I touched his shoulder and he jumped.
When he went for his penlight I thought I was cooked. But all he did was throw
the hardcopy onto the cobblestones and torch it.
"Feel better?"
"Stick it."
"Lake Leman," I said carefully, "is what the French call Lake Geneva.
And Chillon is a castle. In Montreux."
"Actually," whispered the fact checker, "it's in the suburb of
Veytaux."
I ignored this for now. "I'm pretty sure this is from a poem called
'The Prisoner of Chillon' by Byron."
He thought it over for a moment, biting his lower lip. "Montreux." He
nodded; he looked almost human again. "Uh -- okay, Montreux. But why does he
have to get cute when my plug's in a vise? Poetry -- what does he think we
are, anyway? I don't know a thing about poetry. And all Yellowbaby ever read
was manuals. Who was supposed to get this, anyway?"
I stirred the ashes of the hardcopy with my toe. "I wonder." A cold
wind scattered them and I shivered.
****
It took us a little over six hours from the time we bailed out of the
wing to the moment we reached the barricaded bridge that spanned Chillon's
scummy moat. All our connections had come off like Swiss clockwork: postal bus
to the little town of Rolle on the north shore of Lake Geneva, train to
Lausanne, where we changed for a local to Montreux. No one challenged us and
Django sagged into a kind of withdrawal trance, contemplating his reflection
in the window with a marble-egg stare. The station was deserted when we
arrived. Montreux, explained the fact checker, had once been Lake Geneva's
most popular resort but the tourists had long since stopped coming, frightened
off by rumors -- no doubt true, despite official denials from Bern -- that the
lake was still dangerously hot from the Geneva bomb in '39. We ended up hiking
several kilometers through the dark little city, navigating by the light of
the gibbous moon.
Which showed us that Byron was long out of date. Chillon's battlement
was no longer snow-white. It was fire blackened and slashed with laser scars;
much of the northeastern facade was rubble. There must have been a firefight
during the riots after the bomb. The castle was built on a rock about twenty
meters from the shore. It commanded a highway built on a narrow strip of land