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

one of its two smaller arms twisted its four fingers into a crude approximation of an ancient gesture of
insult. Borovsky quickly returned the gesture and looked the other way.
Wolf Lair looked after the egg-shaped machine until it moved out of sight. "Coyne is a believer, Mik.
I think he hates you for the spirit you wear."
Borovsky hoisted one end of the next beam. "Pah. He believes in his own mouth."
"But I have seen him walk three levels up to the Catholic mass. Catholics fear all spirits. Hate is a
good mask for the things you fear."
"Laura's no spirit. Hell, she's a computer." Borovsky pushed against the end of the beam. Laura
pushed with him. The beam crept into position in line with the tiny red spots of light produced by the
laser-alignment network.
"Maybe computer is the new word for spirit. Maybe it is a spirit for nonbelievers. I heard you talk
about the loan you got two years ago. You said you bought a soul for your space suit."
Wolf Lair leaned forward and helped Borovsky move the beam to its final position. Together they
tacked it down with dollops of adhesive after checking it against all fifty alignment spots. Borovsky
leaned back against a pillar and stared down at the stars creeping past beneath his feet.
"Shit, I was lonely. You can go home to Leah and your little ones twice a year. They send you letters
and presents, and you send them money. This up here is all the home I got, and nobody in it but me.
Ain't no woman anywhere would live here and get smashed under this much swing. You Indians got it
good. Your women wait for you in their mountains. In the city no woman remembers your name ten
minutes after you screw her. I thought about it a long time. All I did was buy something that would be
on my side no matter what, just something that sounded like a woman." Laura pinched him hard in a
very sensitive place. "But it turned out to be a woman that was worth something."
"I hear you, Mik. You say it well. I was twenty when I signed up for space. My grandfather took me
aside and said, `Wolf Lair, do not give over your heart to machinery. Machines are to use and put away
when day is gone. Only living things are worth the true heart of a man.' He is dead some years, but I will
never forget him. You know that lesson as well, I think. You had nothing worth your true heart; so you
bought a spirit. The spirit you bought is nothing so simple as a loyal dog, or even a dead man's restless
ghost. I know it comforts you and will never disobey you, but forgive me if I fear it. Forgive Coyne if he
fears it. I could never understand or trust a spirit that lived in a machine."
Wolf Lair's words disturbed Laura. He was not given to speeches and was not one to admit his heart's
fears and feelings. She waited to hear what Borovsky would answer, but he said nothing. The sun passed
under their feet five more times, and the two men worked in silence.
For three days Borovsky avoided the Beer Tube. At shift's end he slept, sleeping as much as fourteen
hours at once. Laura sampled his blood and read his vital signs daily, and she knew that his body was
repairing the damage Coyne had done it and the further damage Borovsky was doing by continuing to

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work without a break for healing. Once, watching him as he slept, she played the balalaika tape for
herself alone, but only once. Other times she restlessly walked the Low Steel empty, thinking. She
thought about Coyne, and about Wolf Lair, and about herself.
She thought about souls.
Standing on a naked monocrystal beam above the bottomless void, she looked down and saw Rigel
creeping past. The spectroscope on her instrument-blistered helmet studied it, sent data streaming from
her A sensory layer inward. Stored data raced outward from D memory layer to meet it. Information
met, intersected, compared, cross-referenced in a process that, it seemed to Laura, was both methodical
and more than methodical, It found more in the rainbow-layered image of a star than the star had to
offer. But no - the handling of data was not her soul.
The pleasure, then, in that handling. Had the pleasure in her own processes been there before