"George R. R. Martin - WC 4 - Aces Abroad" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

these things, I fear. The politicians, of both the domestic and UN varieties,
have clustered to our right, the aces forward of us (aces up front, of course,
of course) and to our left. Must stop now, the stewardess has asked me to put my
tray table back up.
Airborne. New York and Robert Tomlin International Airport are far behind us,
and Cuba waits ahead. From what I've heard, it will be an easy and pleasant
first stop. Havana is almost as American as Las Vegas or Miami Beach, albeit
considerably more decadent and wicked. I may actually have friends there some of
the top joker entertainers go on to the Havana casinos after getting their
starts in the Funhouse and the Chaos Club. I must remind myself to stay away
from the gaming tables, however; joker luck is notoriously bad.
As soon as the seat belt sign went off, a number of the aces ascended to the
first-class lounge. I can hear their laughter drifting down the spiral
stairway-Peregrine, pretty young Mistral-who looks just like the college student
she is when not in her flying gear-boisterous Hiram Worchester, and Asta Lenser,
the ballerina from the ABT whose ace name is Fantasy. Already they are a tight
little clique, a "fun bunch" for whom nothing could possibly go wrong. The
golden people, and Tachyon very much in their midst. Is it the aces or the women
that draw him? I wonder? Even my dear friend Angela, who still loves the man
deeply after twenty-odd years, admits that Dr. Tachyon thinks mainly with his
penis where women are concerned.
Yet even among the aces there are the odd men out. Jones, the black strongman
from Harlem (like Troll and Hiram W and Peregrine, he requires a custom seat, in
his case to support his extraordinary weight), is nursing a beer and reading a
copy of Sports Illustrated. Radha O'Reilly is just as solitary, gazing out the


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window. She seems very quiet. Billy Ray and Joanne Jefferson, the two justice
Department aces who head up our security contingent, are not delegates and thus
are seated back in the second section.
And then there is Jack Braun. The tensions that swirl around him are almost
palpable. Most of the other delegates are polite to him, but no one is truly
friendly, and he's being openly shunned by some, such as Hiram Worchester. For
Dr.
Tachyon, clearly Braun does not even exist. I wonder whose idea it was to bring
him on this trip? Certainly not Tachyon's, and it seems too politically
dangerous for Hartmann to be responsible. A gesture to appease the conservatives
on SCARE perhaps? Or are there ramifications that I have not considered?
Braun glances up at the stairway from time to time, as if he would love nothing
so much as to join the happy group upstairs, but remains firmly in his seat. It
is hard to credit that this smooth-faced, blond-haired boy in the tailored
safari jacket is really the notorious Judas Ace of the fifties. He's my age or
close to it, but he looks barely twenty ... the kind of boy who might have taken
pretty young Mistral to her senior prom a few years back and gotten her home
well before midnight.
One of the reporters, a man named Downs from Aces magazine, was up here earlier,
trying to get Braun to consent to an interview. He was persistent, but Braun's