"John Kessel - Some Like It Cold - v 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

"You don't have any family. Your mother is in an institution. And where were your friends tonight?"
She put her hand to her head, rubbed her forehead, a gesture so full of troubled intelligence that I had a sudden sense of her as a real person, a grown woman in a lot of trouble. "You don't want to mess with me," she said. "I'm not worth it. I'm nothing but trouble."
"I can cure your trouble. In the future we have ways. No one here really cares for you, Marilyn, no one truly understands you. That dark pit of despair that opens up inside you-we can fill it. We can heal the wounds you've had since you were a little girl, make up for all the neglect you've suffered, keep you young forever. We have these powers. It's my job to correct the mistakes of the past, for special people. You're one of them. I have a team of caregivers waiting for you, a home, emotional support, understanding. "
"Yeah. Another institution. I can't take it." I came over, sat beside her, lowered my voice, looked her in the eyes. Time for the closer. "You know that poem-that Yeats poem?"
"What poem?"
" 'Never Give All the Heart.' " Research had made me memorize it. It was one of her favorites.

"Never give all the heart, for love,
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem

Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight

She stopped me. "What about it?" Her voice was edgy.
"Just that life doesn't have to be like the poem, brief, and you don't have to suffer. You don't have to give all the heart, and lose."
She sat there, wound in the blanket. Clearly I had touched something in her.
"Think about it," I said. I went outside and smoked another Lucky. When I'd started working for DAA I'd considered this a glamour job. Exotic times, famous people. And I was good at it. A quick study, smart, adaptable. Sincere. I was so good that Gabrielle came to hate me, and left.
After a considerable while Marilyn came outside, the blanket over her head and shoulders like an Indian.
"Well, kemosabe?" I asked.
Despite herself, she smiled. Although the light was dim, the crow's feet at the comers of her eyes were visible. "If I don't like it, will you bring me back?"
"You'll like it. But if you don't I promise I'll bring you back."
"Okay. What do I have to do?"
"Just pack a few things to take with you-the most important ones."
I waited while she threw some clothes into a suitcase. She took the Lincoln portrait off the wall and put it in on top. I bagged the blood filter and set up the portable unit in the living room.
"Maf!" she said.
"What?"
"My dog!" She looked crushed, as if she were about to collapse. "Who'll take care of Maf?"
"Mrs. Murray will."
"She hates him! I can't trust her." She was disintegrating. "I can't go. This isn't a good idea."
"Where is Maf? We'll take him."
We went out to the guest house. The place stunk. The dog, sleeping on an old fur coat, launched himself at me, yapping, as soon as we opened the door. It was one of those inbred over-groomed toy poodles that you want to drop kick into the next universe. She picked him up, cooed over him, made me get a bag of dog food and his water dish. I gritted my teeth.
In the living room I moved the chair aside and made her stand in the center

of the room while I laid the wire circle around us to outline the field. She was nervous. I held her hand, she held the dog. "Here we go, Marilyn."
I touched the switch on the case. Marilyn's living room receded from us in all directions, we fell like pebbles into a dark well, and from infinitely far away the transit stage at DAA rushed forward to surround us. The dog growled. Marilyn swayed, put a hand to her head. I held her arm to steady her.
From the control booth Scoville and a nurse came up to us. The nurse took Marilyn's other side. "Marilyn, this is a nurse who's going to help you get some rest. And this is Derek Scoville, who's running this operation."
We got her into the suite and the doctors shot her full of metabolic cleansers. I promised her I'd take care of Maf, then pawned the dog off on the staff. I held her hand, smiled reassuringly, sat with her until she went to sleep. Lying there she looked calm, confident. She liked being cared for; she was used to it. Now she had a whole new world waiting to take care of her. She thought.
It was all up to me.
I went to the prep room, showered, and switched to street clothes: an onyx Singapore silk shirt, cotton baggies, spex. The weather report said it was a bad UV day: I selected a broad-brimmed hat. I was inspecting my shoes, which looked ruined from the muck from Marilyn's garden, when a summons from Scoville showed in the comer of my spex: meet them in the conference room. Levine and Sally House were there, and the doctor, and Jason Cryer from publicity. "So, what do you think?" Levine asked me.
"She's in pretty rough shape. Physically she can probably take it, but emotionally she's a wreck. "
"Tomorrow we'll inject her with nanorepair devices," the doctor said. "She's probably had some degree of renal damage, if not worse."
"Christ, have you seen her scars?" Levine said. "How many operations has she had? Did they just take a cleaver to them back then?"
"They took a cleaver first, then an airbrush," Sally said.
"We'll fix the scars," said Cryer. Legend had it the most dangerous place in Hollywood was between Cryer and a news camera. "And Detlev here will be her protector, right Det? After all, you saved her life. You're her friend. Her dad. Her lover, if it comes to that."
"Right," I said. I thought about Marilyn, asleep at last. What expectations did she have?
Scoville spoke for the first time. "I want us into production within three weeks. We've got eighty million already invested in this. Sally, you can crank publicity up to full gain. We're going to succeed where all the others have failed. We're going to put the first viable Marilyn on the wire. She