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

major nerves. Puts the bad hand back in the pocket of the Forty-Niner jacket.

"My hand." Damn. Speaking again.

But no one hears. The bus shelter, an open hut of plexi-panel and chrome, stands empty beside an
empty street under the overhead wires for the electric buses. By leaving early, she's beaten the change of
shift from the hospital; she'll get a seat on the bus, here near the end of its long run from downtown. It will
trundle a few blocks to the ocean, pause, rum, and then head back along Geary Boulevard, but Tiffany
will transfer off long before it reaches the concrete and glass jumble that used to be the heart of the City.
Across the street the long row of pastel stucco houses, stuck together cheek by jowl, gleam in the warm
November sun. House. Window. Door. About half the houses have their windows boarded up, doors
nailed shut, roofs peeling and crumbling. The rest, judging from the improvised curtains, flowered bed
sheets or the red and yellow stripes that the Brazilians like so much, shelter refugees. On the tiny porches,
behind rusting grates, sit stacks of baskets and cardboard boxes, flowing with things, unrecognizable piles
of cloth and packets. On a couple of porches toddlers, dressed only in dirty diapers or a little shirt, clutch
the safety gates and stare out like prisoners. Tiffany yawns. The sun is too warm, deadly warm. She can
remember cold Novembers, when the fog lay thick on the Bay and the hills, or it would rain, sometimes
even three days in a row. She remembers her mother picking her up at day-care, and how they would
run giggling through the cold rain to their warm house with light glowing in the windows. Her sister would
be home before them, because she was old enough to have her own front door key and let herself in after
school, but not old enough to pick Tiffany up from day-care. Water. Hand. The palm of her hand, stiff
and reluctant to move. She was never left alone to curl her hands round metal bars and stare down empty
streets. Her mother, an Army widow, was never forced to work for near-slave wages as these Brazilian
mothers are.

Orange and white, the electric bus glides up to the stop. Blue sparks flash as its connector rods tremble,
sway then slip from the overhead wires and fall, bouncing and flaring, onto the roof. Tiffany boards,
sliding her FastPass into the computerized slot, squeezing out of the stout operator's way as she clatters
down the stairs to get the rods back up and power back on. Tiffany spots her favorite seat, a single
jammed in across from the back door, where no one can sit directly beside her, and heads for it. As the
bus shudders and sparks appear outside the back window, the handful of passengers all mutter to
themselves or thek companions.

"Jeez, they can put a man on Mars, but they can't build a decent trolley."

Spoken aloud again, but fortunately she's passing a plump old woman, laden with shopping bags, who
smiles and nods agreement, just as if Tiffany had in fact been speaking to her. Tiffany smiles in return,
hurries to her chosen seat, scrunches down in it, stretching her long legs into the aisle, pulling them back,
stretching them out again since the trolley's mostly empty. Being inside a small metal space can be very
difficult, and today she feels the walls shrinkingтАжor do they swell?

They move somehow, at any rate, and eat up the space around her. She takes a deep breath and stares
across the aisle to the door. And the window. And hospital hill outside the window. Swearing under her
breath the operator hurries up the front steps and into her tiny compartment. The computer beeps once,
announces that the next stop will be Land's End, and signals the operator to begin. Just as the bus swings
out into the street, Tiffany sees a man running, or rather trotting, for the bus. The operator ignores him,
the bus pulls away, he stands waving his arms and calling down half-heard imprecations.

Tiffany turns in her seat to keep him in view a moment longer. A little man, slightly stooped, wearing a
black suit over a white shirt and a black vest, and a plump black hat of great age, he raises one fist and