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

"Think of resting on the surface of that planet and whirling about at
eighty thousand kilometers an hour!"
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.
"As you wish."
The data screen went to abstract blobs for fractions of a second, then it
was filled with a glowing diagram of the new system: the oblate, pulsating
planet, its scabrous surface features whirling in the center of the
screen; the smaller, rocky moons revolving rapidly about their master.
"We can land only once," Shoten purred. "We must carefully select our
touchdown point. Then later expeditions may explore further. But if we
choose poorly, the worlds may abandon this Yuggoth" -- Gomati's name for
the great planet was spoken sardonically -- "forever." Shoten's cyborged
head nodded in self-affirmation, then the synthesized words were repeated,
"Yes, forever."

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