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

Tiffany smiles. Rosas opens a drawer, pulls out a green tennis ball, and tosses it over. Tiffany grabs with
her bad hand and manages to make contact, but claw-like her fingers refuse to close. The ball totters on
her palm, then falls, rolling across the floor.

"It still kinda leaves a streak behind it, when it's rolling, I mean," Tiffany says.

"Kinda?"

"Well, the afterimage is faint, you know? It used to look solid."

Rosas nods and makes a note on one of the sheets.

"The hand still hurt where they reconnected it?"

"Only when it's cold and damp."

Another nod, another note, a pause while she consults the pieces of paper. Tiffany realizes that she's
trying to decipher every gesture the doctor makes as if it were a word, some holy word delivered by a
priest.

"Captain," this said very casually. "What nationality are you, again?"

"Californian. Shit. I mean, American."

"So California's not a sovereign nation."

"Course not. That was weird, when I thought there was a Republic, I mean. I could see how I'd forget
stuff, lots of stuff, but it was just weird to find out I was remembering something that never happened."

"I hear blame in your voice. You cannot blame yourself for the weird things." The doctor smiles, putting
the word weird in invisible quotes. "It's in your wiring. So your memory glitched. Big deal. We've all seen
'California Republic' written on flags thousands of times, haven't we? It has its own logic, when you think
about it. A reasonable mistake."

"Yeah, I know, butтАж"

"But it's hard not to blame yourself. I know that too. And then you blame yourself for the blame. A
vicious circle. But we'll get you free of it yet. Remember: almost ten minutes total without oxygen to the
brain. Remind yourself of that. Over nine minutes total. Of course you've got problems, but we'll teach
you how to wire around them."

A joke, of course, an often-repeated joke at rehab, this business of "wiring around" various problems.
Tiffany grins, but even as she shares this moment of good humor, she feels like a liar. Caught in her
memory тАФ no, created by the wiring, or so she tells herself тАФ is a mental image, as sharp and clear as
any photo, of a tiny booklet covered in forest-green leatherette and stamped with the California seal in
gold leaf. Along the edge lies gold lettering, illegible in memory image, yet the entire booklet seems so
ominous in the root sense, as well as charged with anxiety (a thing she was always groping for in her
shoulder bag or patting her pockets to confirm its presence), that she knows it must be something crucial,
her passport, perhaps, her officer's identification papers, maybe, something that marked her officially and