"Katharine Kerr - Resurrection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kerr Katherine)

"Captain." Someone has grabbed her arm, someone is shaking her arm. "Captain, you're here now. You
arehere now ."

The monitors are shrieking, the voice is sharp but concerned. Tiffany sees a beige face, black eyes,
black bangs, swimming in front of hers. A therapist. With a name of some kind. A manicured hand
reaches out and shuts the monitor blessedly up. The silence brings Tiffany's mind back.

"Sorry, Hazel."

Hazel Weng-Chang smiles but does not release her patient's arm.

"Come sit down, captain. Come have some juice. Time for a rest."

Free of the monitors Tiffany limps into the lounge, all restful blues and lavenders, plus two walls of
windows with a view that any realtor would drool over. Down at the bottom of a steep wooded slope
the San Francisco Bay spreads out blue in the sunlight to the golden hills of Marin County; close by to
her left lies the Pacific Ocean, and, turning back to the right, toward the City itself, she can see the
rusty-orange bridge, gleaming and glinting with windshields as the maglev trains rush back and forth. As
she watches, a white and red grain ship slides under and through, headed out to sea, loaded with
California's new gold, rice for a rich but always hungry Japan.

Inside the lounge, slumped on one of the blue sofas, the two Jasons are talking about the Forty-Niner
game. By the window, wired into his electro-chair sits Pedro, staring at nothing again. Thanks to the chair
he can use both arms, as well as breathe, spit, think, and perform a few other basic functions. Chair or no
he'll never talk again, but the set of his shoulders tells Tiffany to stay away. They all know each other very
well here in the rehab lounge, better than the doctors and the therapists (both physical and neuro) ever
will. The two Jasons, one black, one white, look up, study her face for a brief moment, smile, then leave
her alone. For that gesture she loves them.

In the corner stands the pale blue juice machine, dispensing three flavors, apple, orange, lemon-lime, but
the real juice of course is the mixture of liquid vitamins and drugs that the computer plops into each
pre-mea-sured glass. When Tiffany presses her thumb onto the ID panel, the machine mixes up her
personal formula, dumps it in, then opens the little door. As she takes the paper cup, the machine clears
its mechanical throat.

"Please take a stickette and stir your juice. Please drink slowly. Please dispose of your stickette
properly."

The more advanced patients, like Tiffany, have come to hate the scrape and echo of this perpetual
message, but plenty of people in therapy here at Veteran's Hospital need to be reminded every single
time. Steadying the cup in her good hand, she limps over to an armchair by the other window, to leave
Pedro his space, and sits down with a sigh. Automatically she glances at the clock: 1430 hours. In
another half hour she can leave and go home. She's one of the lucky ones, Tiffany, an out-patient with a
home here in San Francisco. She's one of the very lucky ones. Two months ago she would have looked
at the numbers on the clock read-out and found them utterly meaningless. She could name the numbers:
one four three oh. She merely could not connect them with an idea as abstract as time. Now they have
regained their alchemical power of transforming a moment of time into a point of the virtual space known
as a day. Of course, everyone at this rehab center, the Zombie Ward as they call it, is lucky. All of them
have died at least once, have lain dead for at least a few minutes until frantic doctors could pummel their
hearts back alive and force their blood to start circulating the drugs that jump-started their brains. Tiffany,