"Jay Lake - The Golden Whip" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

The Golden Whip
by Jay Lake

By all the saints and murders, if I'm going to lash myself in the hard-heart, it's going to be with a golden
whip. Silver's for pussies and pretty boys with tattooed eyeshade and one ball lost to the pimper-man.
The high-hats like titanium, rendered fibrous and braided into a coil sharper than a toothsome serpent and
twice as louche as Cleopatra's twat. Poor folks do it with plastic, like they always have, retro-heads do it
with leather like they always will.

Me?

Gold.

Good old fashioned riverbed riches a man with a tin pan and a decent shotgun could winnow out of
God's country, at least back when God had a country. He's stateless now that the Vatican's gone retail
and Mecca is a parking garage for the sandraces.

No, gold for my whip, gold for my heart, gold to pay me for the betrayals I've heaped on those around
me. For the love of Me, anyone who'd sell himself for thirty pieces of grubby silver doesn't know the
commodity market for warm snot.

A man's honor is always worth spot avoirdupois.

***

There's this thing that happens when you contract your happy ass to Mother Company. Docs come
rolling in with blinking lights and a needle long as your forearm. Mostly for show, they could do it with
cell-wall traction and biomagnetism and damned if you'd know better than you'd just been pinched by a
table-elf down at Sally's Dirty Bar, but that needle says "serious" in a voice could draw blood off a street
lamp.

You listen when doc plunges that thing into your chest. Well, maybe you do. I screamed like a girl until
my teeth buzzed. Sooner be knifed with a nickelback shiv out of the hoverbays.

There's the priest-comporter reading rites and contract clauses over you, there's the recruiter grinning into
his next bonus, there's two witnesses shagged out of the drunk box тАФ never fear boys, you're next тАФ
then you're in with Mother.

Everything's easy after that. Which is kind of the point. Pain and focus, boy, pay attention. We'll never
hurt you this much again. Unless you get out of line. Or we get bored. Or the wind blows north by
northwest and Cary Grant comes stumbling through the corn, guns blazing from the summer sky.

They suck you in with a little bit of money and little bit of the warm and little of bit of plain old fashioned
easy. After a while you don't know no better.

Lot of guys spend their lives that way, happy.

A few slip the noose and run for the riverbanks, diving into an acid bath hoping to swim faster than their
muscles will slough away.