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

came around.
"Laura," he whispered.
"I love you," she said, without breaking her stride.
"He had a metal bar shoved up his ass," he said, and coughed. "Crapped it out on the floor, grabbed
it, and that was that. I'm gonna kill the fugger. You watch me."
"I love you," she said again, hoping against knowledge that the words would soothe the murderous
rage she feared might get him killed.
A world without Borovsky-
"Love you too," he mumbled, only half-conscious. "I'm gonna kill him."
By morning the bruises showed up. Borovsky swore at his image in the mirror. The left half of his
face was swollen grotesquely. Ugly purple blotches covered most of his cheek and curved up nearly to
surround his left eye. All across his body were bruises and scrapes from hitting the iron going down. He
pressed a bruise with one finger and jerked the finger away from the fiery pain.
Laura watched, unmoving. The tiny, cylindrical pod with its watercot, its kitchen, its shower, and
squat toilet was very silent. If Borovsky fought again, if he insisted on fighting again today-
Panic appeared in her crystalline, layered machine mind, seeping outward from the F layer at the
core. Layers A through E were standard Manplifier equipment: sensory, motor, communications,
memory, and intellect. Borovsky had paid three years' wages for the F layer that Laura so cherished:
unique, personal, precious - her soul. The E layer, shared by any machine that could speak and reason,
could have stopped the panic, but it did not. Instead, when Laura could no longer stand the way he stood
gripping the edge of the sink in furious silence, she spoke.
"You didn't have to go fight him."
He spat into the sink. "He called me a phobe. Maybe once I can take it. Maybe twice. Some people
have to make noise. But he made me answer him. So I answered." He probed a bruise on his thigh,
wincing. "What do we got for bruises?"
Laura turned and searched a small cabinet beside the bed. "Hemoverithol."
"Let's have it."
Laura pressed an autoampul against his thigh and squeezed.
He sighed as the needle came and went, then nodded. "How long?"
Thousands of words of medical data flew past the eyes of Laura's mind. "Eighteen hours to kill the
swelling. Color should be gone in forty-eight. I hope we can afford another yoyo; the spare wasn't new
when we bought it and-"
"Nix. Rent's up, food's up - we get a new yoyo and we'd default on your soul. Gimme a couple
months. We'll get a new one from that bastard Coyne even if I have to beat it out of his hide."
"Maybe we should stay away from the Beer Tube for a few days."
"He'll be laughing behind his ugly face."
"Let him laugh. Borovsky-"
"Don't say it." He turned to her and smiled. The smile was made lopsided by the swelling in his
cheek, and even when whole it was not a smile to charm women - too flat, too suspicious, too much of
the smile of an outsider more used to contempt than to love. But Laura was not a woman of flesh. This
smile was Borovsky's. It was enough.

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"Let me run the balalaika," Laura said. The image came to her mind instantly: Borovsky as he looked
while listening to the tape of his father playing the ancient balalaika. The tape was all he had brought up
from the crumbling slum that was Deep West London. The sad, hollow music made his face change -
change from underneath, Laura thought.
At those times his features lost some of their hardness; his eyes ceased their constant nervous