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

"No." Were people still crying for me, somewhere in the western Pacific?

"Go away."

"No."

The cat shrugged with the grace of its kind and rolled off the back of the wall, falling from my sight into
the endless green void that is the jungle.
Where there's a wall, there's a way, I thought, and followed down the shadowed road the cat had shown
me.

***

When finally I found the beach, the Intros found me. Small men and women, wearing shark-leather loin
cloths and necklaces strung with data storage beads.

"Company man," said one, a red-head who looked a hell of a lot like a certain cat. She had the same
sparkle to her as the bastard who'd busted my office with holy fire all those...days...weeks...years ago?

"Still got wires in his head," said another. He'd been dark-skinned once, that one, but spent enough time
underwater to stretch out, wrinkle up and go pale as a rotten grape. He jabbed toward me with a
coral-headed spear, but it was a lazy, slow move.

"Mother talk to you at night?" the red-head asked.

I found my words, throat like sanded glass. "Just the cat."

She smiled and I was sure, though I already knew I'd never know.

"And the fire," I added. It was in my veins, strong as ever, though the jungle hadn't given it much to latch
to except fractal noise and olfactory overloads. These Intros with their gear and their weird and the
pounding sea behind them were bringing up the flames of the holy fire sure as any hydrogen leak.

"Let us in," she said.

For her, I would do anything.

I sold my people for a smile.

***

Intros might be living in huts, but they got gear. Nice, organic gear runs on xylem matrices with
diamond-seed nangates embedded. Slower than a whore's smile, but unhackable except with
Monsanto's best.

Not much Monsanto down here on the shores of paradise. That's why it was still paradise.

They tied me down, fed me palm wine, doped me up, laid a hypno hook or twenty, wired me in off a
triple sat-bounce through a black-sponge router, and hacked their merry way into Mother's western