"Nancy Kress - Borovsky's Hollow Woman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

she lifted it toward Borovsky and smiled again.
"How long since you've had a real woman?" Weinblatt asked. Borovsky muttered something that
Laura did not think Weinblatt would catch above the jukebox, but she did: four years.
"I'm real," Laura said, her voice low. "I'm real and I'm - look at them! Like puddles of melting
cranberry sauce! Either of us could outlift, outhaul, outproduce them all put together. How can you?
Borovsky-"
"It's not my idea," Borovsky said sullenly, finally stepping free of her. Laura realized that it would
not matter how much she looked at him, what she said, or how she behaved. She could not change
Borovsky's mind.
Confused and hurting, she stepped back against the wall. Borovsky moved quickly away from her,
heading toward the far end of the room, ignoring the blonde who followed him with charcoaled eyes. In
moments he was lost in the swirling mist. Eagerness to see more melting cranberry women - or to get
away from her? Laura was not sure, though she suspected the latter, arid took from that some small
wrapping of comfort.
"He talking to you?" the blonde demanded. She stared at the emptiness above Laura's helmet gasket,
at the head that Laura had never had nor wanted.
"Yes."
"Huh!" She sounded neither surprised nor scornful, only annoyed. "He don't like blondes?"
"I don't know what he likes."
The woman looked at Laura shrewdly. "I'll bet you do so, Honey." Suddenly she laughed, such an

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unselfconscious, friendly laugh that Laura found herself drawn away from the wall to stand beside the
woman's pentagonal waterbed. The lights beneath it shifted from green to red, warming the woman's
skin so that to Laura it looked like uncooled metal.
"Why do you do this?" Laura asked softly.
"Do what?"
"Make . . . love to these men. You aren't their work partners. You have no interest in their lives. They
haven't bought you a soul. You don't love them."
The blonde gave her a long, speculative look. Something surfaced in her eyes, something Laura had
the quickness to see but not the knowledge of humanity to interpret. Then the human woman laughed
again. "It's a living."
A living. Laura hadn't seen it that way before. People had to live. Steelwalkers needed sex; Laura
knew they talked of it enough, and few had fine Rabinowicz suits like Laura. There was a good,
respectable economic foundation to Berenice's Cluster. But Borovsky - Borovsky did have her.
"Jealous, Honey?" the blonde said softly. She did not mock. Her eyes, lids painted blue as far as her
brows, seemed sympathetic and a little sad. Staring into those eyes, Laura felt the odd sensation of
unrelated data suddenly relating: The woman's eyes reminded her of Borovsky's balalaika music.
"Don't cry about it," the blonde said. "That's how a steelwalker is. Tin woman, skin woman - he don't
care. We do what we can."
"No," Laura said. "No!"
"Sorry." Again the blonde gave Laura that knowing and sad, blue-lidded look. From the airlock a
man walked into the room and stripped off his rubber suit. After glancing around the misty room, he
smiled at the blonde. She raised her huge breast to him and looked up through her lashes. The man
sauntered over to the bed.
"Silver lay, stud?"
"Purple quickie. You available?" The man grinned mischievously at her.
"Why not?"