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

Laura stepped back against the wall. Around the blonde's bed the blue mist grew thicker, rising in
hazy walls shot through with multicolored light from the bed. The man in his eagerness had left his
rubber suit at Laura's feet. She kicked at it, then abruptly picked it up and hung it on a nearby peg. Its
empty arms dangled helplessly. Without a man inside it, it was useless. Rubber suits. Balalaika music.
Blue-lidded eyes. Borovsky. Simon Weinblatt. Coyne. Silver lays. Souls - Souls.
That was what she had seen in the blonde's sympathetic look.
Startled, Laura stared at the bed. The mist around the bed grew thicker and darker blue. The bed
began to move away from Laura on its cushion of air. Another bed, this one with two women and one
man just leaving it, slid toward Laura. One of the women put one foot on the floor and squealed. The
man laughed and slapped her bare ass. Music blared and mist swirled. Nothing in the scene looked to
Laura anything like Wolf Lair's outstretched arms on the steel beam, but Laura knew she was not
mistaken. In the blonde's balalaika eyes Laura had seen another soul. And she had recognized it only
because she had her own.
Laura settled back against the wall in resignation and waited for the sliding beds to bring Borovsky
back to her.
The spare yoyo was dead.
Borovsky snapped the battery cover free and peered into the space crowded with wires and age-

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crusted components. Nothing looked amiss.
"Take a look," he told Laura, and poked their right hand into the cavity.
Laura's fingers nudged the wires aside as the eyes that rode over each finger examined the
mechanism.
Her fingers saw it and teased it out into view from where it had been tucked behind a voltage
regulator: a carefully snipped wire.
Hesitantly she described the wire. Borovsky stopped for many long seconds, one hand on the battery
pack and one hand holding a screwdriver.
"He came in here. I noticed him before we got tied up with the trouble setting up the last beam. He
didn't come out."
Borovsky and Laura checked between the piles of steel for a place where a man might hide.
"We could have missed him coming out," Laura suggested.
"I don't miss nothing from him no more," Borovsky replied coldly. "He's in here."
Laura said nothing. Borovsky's bionics alarmed her. Pulse, blood pressure, muscle tension, skin
resistancethis was not normal anger. He was in a cold rage.
In one corner of the dump was a circular column three meters wide, rising up from the floor and
vanishing into the ceiling. It was the conduit core that carried power down from the center of the titan
cylinder to the construction on the Low Steel. At knee level was the inspection hatch.
"Get that hatch on your infrared," Borovsky ordered.
The wide oval eye on Laura's brow saw the vague smudge on the hatch's handle. The vacuum of E
Minus Seven preserved heat traces well.
"There were hands on that handle recently," she said, wishing it were not so.
Borovsky grunted and grasped the handle. It would not turn.
"Locked," Laura said.
"For me, maybe. Not for you. Turn."
Laura's fingers tightened on the handle and twisted hard. She felt the metal of the latch resist and
moan, then break free. The hatch swung inward.
Wriggling through the hatch took some minutes. It had not been designed for passing a man in an
amplified Rabinowicz space suit. Laura supposed that had been Coyne's hope . . . and ached that it could