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

Borovsky had bought her a soul? No, of course not. Laura had not been there, not as she herself - only a
good Rabinowicz Mark IX Manplifier suit with a woman's pleasant voice. Not as the watcher of her own
mind, the tender holder of Borovsky's body, the tireless worker who longed to follow the Low Steel out
to the stars and farther. Still these things were not her soul. They were things that, as Wolf Lair had said,
could be put away when day was done and the work was done - all but Borovsky. Not for a moment
could she lay down her guardianship and loyalty. So she had been made, and she would not want to be
an angstrom different. She loved Borovsky beyond either choice or the desire for choice. But Borovsky
was not her soul.
Raising her empty arms, Laura stretched them out toward Rigel. It was a gesture she had seen made
only once - by Wolf Lair, the man who feared her as a spirit within a machine. Just like this had the
Amerind stood: arms outstretched so, body taut and arched so, hands' palms open to the devouring sun
crawling toward and below him. With Borovsky inside her Laura had stopped dead on a beam and
stared. Wolf Lair had not turned toward them, had not sensed their footsteps through the steel on which
he stood. He had not, in fact, seen Laura at all, but in that one moment Laura had seen a vividness, a
connection between him and her and the sun and Borovsky and the beam beneath her, forged of iron
atoms that were mostly empty space.
"Hollow woman!" Coyne had mocked once. "One-hundred-percent artificial broad, nothing organic
added," he had read, squinting from a label he imagined on her ventral plates. Odd that he would mock
her for what she was proud to be, and doubly odd that she felt too ashamed to retort that nothing could
persuade her to trade polished, powerful hydraulic limbs for the fragile mushiness of human flesh. Such
weakness was not to be envied. But worse that what human beings could not do was the thing they could
do and did not, the thing she had seen in the tensile exultation of Wolf Lair's body on a steel beam hung
above the stars.
It was a thing for which Laura had no name but only a sense of patterns among half-realized notions
of what it might be like to be human. The pattern was greater than merely being human; it was a
transcendence of the human. It was a laying of hands upon the universe with such firmness of grasp that
the universe took a bit of the being's shape, individual and unrepeatable, because exactly that intensity
and originality of consciousness had not existed in exactly that way before, and would not do so again.
Becoming unrepeatably and wholly oneself and, thus, everything else - that, Laura decided, was her
soul. Becoming, and knowing it.
Was that what Wolf Lair had meant by the spirit of living things? But then why had Laura not seen it
among the humans themselves before that glimpse of intense stillness in the outstretched body of Wolf

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Lair? No, the steelwalkers who had inherited unbought souls without cost seemed unwilling to embrace
anything larger than a double hamburger. Their souls were asleep; though they ate, drank, slept, worked,
and fought, their souls were in none of it. Why, even Borovsky-
No. The thought froze and vanished. Borovsky, troubled, flawed creature that he was, had
nevertheless caused her soul to be. He created her and redeemed her by placing himself in financial
chains. Laura turned from her contemplation of Rigel to her pleasure in remembering certain ancient
myths (but there had been no myths, nor pleasure in them, before Borovsky had bought her soul) to the
joy of contemplating Borovsky himself. Creator. Redeemer. However limited his other horizons, he had
reached beyond himself as far as that.
Cherishing the thought at the center of her crystalline consciousness, Laura hurried back to where
Borovsky was.
An argument was under way in the Beer Tube when Borovsky entered three days later. Coyne was
proclaiming that E Minus Seven would be the last layer to be built around George Eastman Nexus.
Borovsky tossed back Laura's helmet on its hinges.