"Richard A." - читать интересную книгу автора (Lupoff Richard A)

Njord Freyr rose from his nest-couch. In fact the least extensively
cyborged of the three, he retained three of his original organic limbs.
He
pulled himself around, using Khons's interior free-fall handholds to
steady himself, hooked his strongly servomeched arm through two
handholds
and gestured angrily from Shoten to Sri Gomati.
"We can all read the screens. I asked what this Eurasian bitch was
babbling about!"
"Now, dear," Shoten Binayakya purred ambiguously.
Sri Gomati's shimmering silvery eyes seemed for once not totally
masked,
but fixed on some distant vision. Her hands -- one fitted with an array
of
scientific and mechanical implements, the other implanted with a
multitude
of flexible cartilaginous organs equally suited for technical
manipulation
and erotic excesses -- wove and fluttered before her face. She spoke,
as
 much to herself or to some absent, invisible entity, as to Njord Freyr
or
Shoten Binayakya. It was as if she instructed the batches of
cyberbiotic
brains that populated the electronic network of the ship.
"March 15, 2337, Earth standard time," she crooned. "It would please
him.
It would please him to know that he is remembered. That he was right in
his own day. But how, I wonder, could he have known? Did he merely
guess?
Was he in contact with entities from beyond? Beings from this strange,
gray world past the starry void, this pale, shadowy land?
"Dead four hundred years this day, Howard, does your dust lie in
ancient
ground still? Could some later Curwen not have raised your essential
salts?"
"Madness!" Njord Freyr broke in. With his organic hand he struck
Gomati's
face, his palm rebounding from the hard bone and the harder metal
implanted beneath her flesh.
Her glittering eyes aflash, she jerked her head away, at the same time
twisting to fix him with her angry glare. A circuit of tension sprang
into
being between them, lips of both writhing, faces animated in mute
quarrel.
Beyond this, neither moved.
Only the interruption of Shoten Binayakya's commanding speech broke the
tense immobility. "While you carried out your spat, dears, I had the
cyberbiots plot our orbit through the new system."
"The system of Yuggoth," Gomati reiterated.