"Daniel Marcus - Ex Vitro" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marcus Daniel)

She took a step toward him and put her hand on his arm. He looked up.
She kissed his cheek, tasting blood.
 "I'm sorry, baby," she said. "I'm a little wired out with the war news. I
can't take much more of it." She bit her lip. "If it gets any worse, I'm going
to want Sun to pull us out of here. I need to be near my parents."

"Jesus, Maddy, Paris is the last place we want to be if the shit really
hits the fanтАФit'll go up in a puff of plasma." He paused when he saw the
expression on her face and reached out to touch her arm. "I'm sorry, but
you know it's true. Do you really want to move to Ground Zero?" He let his
arm fall again. "Besides, if we abort, they'll nail us with a stiff fine and
we'll never get them to back us again."

"We can afford it."

Jax shrugged. "We can afford the fine, yeah, but we'd have to start from
scratch with another Group, and that wouldn't be easy."

"Maurice will swing it for us." Maurice Enza was their sponsor at
SunGroup. A hundred-thirty-two years old, mostly cybernetic prosthetics
including eyes and voicebox, still publishing in the theoretical
bio-economics literature. Maddy revered him. Jax respected him, but
privately thought he was something of a spook and had always kept him at
a polite distance.

"Maurice may be as old as Elvis but he isn't God."

Maddy closed her eyes. In, I calm my body. Out, listen, listen.

She opened her eyes and looked closely at him. His face was open and
earnest. He wasn't just being an asshole or doing some kind of power
thing.

Maddy smiled gently. "Let's just see what happens, okay?"


The catfish was delicious, its flesh moist and white, the Cajun-style
crust black and redolent with spice. The lettuce tasted sweeter with the
fact that she had grown it with her own hands, nursed from a rack of
seedlings in a carefully tended nutrient bath to full, leafy plants, their
tangled roots weaving through their bed of saturated foam.

They ate together in silence. A Bach violin concerto played softly on the
lounge speakers, the melodic lines arching gracefully over the muted hum
of the life support systems.
 Strange to be so connected with the sensate, Maddy thought, these
earthy pleasures, while we're in this tin can at the bottom of an ocean of
freezing poison, a billion and a half klicks from most of the people I love.
Where everything's falling apart. Listening to Bach, no less.