"Nancy Kress - Borovsky's Hollow Woman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)
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be easily removable on a bayonet base.
The fingers spread wide, and the hand darted forward, following Coyne's hand in the pantograph. The
steel hand grasped one of the hydraulic tubes on Laura's right shoulder and clamped tightly. The arm
began hauling them forward, out over the glass dome, into the range of the waiting diamond wheel.
The wheel swept toward Laura's helmet and struck her faceplate obliquely with a shriek of hardened
glass against raging diamond. An hourglass-shaped abrasion appeared where the wheel had struck and
glanced away.
Borovsky's one free arm darted out and took hold of the diamond wheel. Quickly Laura's strength
pulled it down and to one side before Coyne could work against them and pressed the wheel against the
smaller arm clamped on Laura's shoulder joint. Only a moment's touch parted the metal skin over the
wrist joint, and the pressurized joint fluid spurted out of the narrow cut. The smaller arm's grip went
limp and the fingers snapped involuntarily open. They scrambled back out of the reach of the cutoff arm.
Borovsky and Coyne stared at each other through the glass of the ELM's dome. Coyne was still in his
torn and filthy rubber underwear, his neck a swollen pattern of purple bruises, his fingers flexing and
working aimlessly in the pantograph.
There was no sign of a space helmet under the dome.
"Bastard! You want tools, Coyne? I show you tools!"
Borovsky reached into his right hip locker and pulled out a carbide scribe. From his belt he hefted a
three-kilo mallet.
"No," Laura said. "The machine 1 is ruined, that's enough! Please don't!"
"Shut up!" Borovsky snapped. He reached down and drew the point of the scribe heavily sidewise
across the glass dome. Glass splinters sparkled in the scribe's wake, leaving behind a jagged scratch.
making a lopsided cross in the glass. He positioned the point of the scribe where the scratches crossed,
and he raised the mallet.
His hand was in her hand. When the mallet descended and struck the scribe, Coyne would die.
"No!" Laura cried. "Kill him and you kill me! My soul, the soul you paid for!"
He did not hear her, or if he did, his rage was so devouring that her words didn't matter. The mallet
began to descend. Laura saw the red cloud appear again and felt it tearing at her F layer. Borovsky
would not stop it. Laura could not stop it - halt the mallet, drug Borovsky, drop the scribe into the Pit -
none of it would halt the red cloud. A machine's soul must obey; a machine's soul must not kill, a
machine's soul-
"No!" Laura screamed again, but this time not to Borovsky.
Something in the scream - something so decisive and anguished that it penetrated even his enraged
mind - made his eyes whip to the side, to the instruments inside Laura's helmet. Human eyes met
electronic eyes, and with a great wrench Borovsky twisted the smashing mallet to miss the carbide
scribe. But the action came a nanosecond too late; Laura did not see it. She had already made her
decision.
In an instant Laura swept away the bright lines of connection between her F layer and her cold outer
intellect, scrambled all sensory paths beyond reassembly. She drew a curtain of chaos between her
innermost self and the world that waited to steal her soul. The crystalline domains went random and
impassable; connections that had taken years to form were gone forever, dragging with them the
burning, immediate memories that her soul could not embrace. Without Borovsky she would be empty,
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