"Richard Laymon - Dreambox Junkies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laymon Richard)

She'd deleted Sick Nick three times already. Doubtless she would weaken and reinstate him again in
due course. She always ended up missing the frissons. Pathetic.

She asked for Lifestyle. The smartpape obliged, words dissolving into more words. The reading wasn't
helping her eye ache, so she opted for audio. To her delight Sesha heard that raw silk was now officially
rehabilitated following a period in the aesthetic wilderness. тАЬSo, it's bye-bye to bombazine, girls.тАЭ She
had always loved the look and the feel of raw silk, and she welcomed it back to her wardrobe's front
line. She also made note of another couple of tips for next season: royal blue nylon housecoats and, for
the evening, unshaven left armpits.

Declining the chance to win a dream kitchen that would be the envy of all her acquaintances, Sesha
checked out Celebs & Goss. She was listening to a frank interview with Cheryl Spleke, the EBC topless
newsjockey, on shopping, sex, breasts, and her bulimic son Sholto, when a hi-pri call interrupted. Sesha
opened her eyes to find the sleekly-bearded face of Ajit on the screen.

тАЬProcessia?"

Ajit had big news. Frances wanted to see her ex-husband. Paul Rayle was living with his new partner
and child in, of all places, Hilford Abbots in Cambridgeshire, only a hundred kilometres up the
motorway. Hilford Abbots was a craft village, one of those painstakingly quaint touristic backwater
enclaves full of dropouts, burnouts, people who couldn't stand the pace. The Luddite element.

Or, Sesha thought, those few among us who have seen sense?

It was common knowledge at the Institute, how Frances had married her domestic, a directionless
philosophy graduate twenty years her junior. They had been divorced for some time, after what were, by
all accounts, several happy years of union. The reasons for their split were none too clear. In the past,
such rifts had often occurred over the issue of children. But these days, with all the nataltech options
available, Frances's lack of progeny would seem to be a choice thing.

And now, it was her ex to whom Frances was turning in the throes of her affliction. How, Sesha
wondered, would Paul Rayle respond? He was proving difficult to contact; Ajit had tried to get through
by all the usual means, but zero joy. Unable or unwilling to answer. Someone would have to go out there.
Someone non-ruraphobic; poor Ajit never, ever ventured outside of the city.

Sesha asked Ajit if he had heard any more about Frances's condition. He hadn't. But no news was
surely better than bad? And whatever came to pass, it didn't have to mean they would all be out of a job.
Not so long as their butts were clean and well-covered. Typical Ajit, thinking of Frances the meal ticket.
Frances Rayle was a lovely human being, and was only fifty-six, and AS was a horror. And if the mother
of Psychotrichology, with her incredible wealth, with all the medical might she could muster, couldn't beat
this thing back, then who could? Frances's research teams had conquered baldness and greyness and
other such obstacles to Personal Fulfilment Through Psychotrichological Congruence. (Although, oddly
enough, it was taking them an age to perfect a hair-straightening pill.) Now surely those same scientists,
those madly clever people, would be oh-so-hard at work on a cure for Angel Syndrome?

тАЬHow's with the CG?тАЭ Ajit wanted to know.
Sesha pulled a face, and drew from her immediate superior a sympathetic grimace.

SomeoneтАФindusaboteurs, cranky antibox activistsтАФhad managed to get to a whole consignment of