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

death. I am judged by my maker every moment that I live.
Coyne's pulse weakened. His pulse! Wait! Laura sent fluid into the insulating layers between
Borovsky's fingers and the outermost skin. Slowly - but there was so little time - she built up a layer of
fluid that kept Borovsky's fingers from truly contacting the outer layer of tough synthetic. While the
fluid flowed into the skin of her fingers, she set her contractile layers to pulsing in her hand, matching
the rhythm of Coyne's laboring heart. In seconds the illusion was complete, and Borovsky, rage
maddened as he was, had not noticed. The pulse he felt was wholly in Laura's skin. Laura gradually
slowed the pulse, made it weaker, until it could barely be felt. Finally it stopped.

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"No pulse," she said. "He's dead."
Borovsky swore and released his hand. Coyne, unconscious, fell in a heap, face-down. Borovsky
backed away from the man, fell back against the opposite wall of the tunnel.
"Jesus. Jesus."
Laura's soul began assembling itself again, gathering back into the haven of her innermost crystalline
layer.
It was hers again - she had not killed; she had not disobeyed. But now there was a dirtiness to her
soul that she felt might never be cleared away.
Borovsky, trembling, backed away from Coyne for several steps before breaking and running toward
the vertical duct from which they had come.

Tied up in a handkerchief on his watercot lay two kilos of gold ingots. Borovsky stared at them. He
was wearing his old rubber suit inside out. He had shaved his head and depilated the stubble. Laura
could stand his behavior no longer.
"Talk to me, dammit!"
"What's to say? They catch me, they'll kill me. Nothing you can do."
"So where can you run to?"
"Earth, London. I never shoulda left. Only crazy men live up here."
Earth. Laura was appalled. But still, Earth would be far from George Eastman Nexus. Far from this
boxed-in deadliness. Borovsky would be there; she could learn to live there, too. She undogged her top
plates before Borovsky looked at her sharply.
"Forget it. Me I can maybe bribe through customs and sneak down. You, no chance."
"You can't leave me!"
"Like hell."
"But I love you!"
"Would you love me better dead? Dushenka, here you can die for bumping a guy on the head and
taking his money. Tivo, three days maybe before they find him. The computers know Coyne hated me.
Ha! Don't take no computer to tell the cops that. They'll be here ten minutes after they find his ugly
corpse."
He looked at her. From his eyes Laura saw that he was pleading for her to understand, to forgive, to
still be the one always on his side. Borovsky would never say it aloud, but it was there in his twisted
face: He could not take her within him, but it hurt him to leave her behind.
Laura reached to him.
"Borovsky, I . . . lied. He isn't dead. I . . . tricked you." Every word was a labor. "I made you feel a
pulse I created, then stopped it. He was still alive when you let go of him."
Borovsky's mouth opened. In that one movement Laura saw her mistake. His fists tightened, and he
glared with the fury of a man who thinks he has been tricked into softness and then kicked in it. "Whore!
Steel bitch! I buy your soul and you look after shit like Coyne! Tell me you didn't do that!"