"Alastair Reynolds - Digital to Analogue" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

IтАЩd gotten my coat quicker than usual, maybe because the club would
stagger on for another hour or so. Outside I met a few friends whoтАЩd spent
the intervening time in an all-night kebab shop. The taxi-rank was on my
walk home so I loitered with them, up the rubbish-strewn streets, kicking
fast-food containers, crushed tins of Red Stripe, ticket stubs. A few
desultory revellers were still ambling around, trying, to find somewhere
open, dossers hanging outside the old pisser in the Bigg Market that looked
like an Edwardian UFO, solitary cop cars kerb-crawling; cherry-lights
reflected in puddles of urine. Overhead, against the winter stars, a
helicopter circled predatorily, hawking the streets below, doubtless
searching for stolen motors that would finish up embedded in shopfronts
come morning. No wonder none of us brought cars. At the taxi-rank we
split, they to their houses in Byker, me to my flat in Fenham. I didnтАЩt have far
to go, really. But itтАЩs not the distance that counts, in the end.

I hiked up my hood, drowning out the plaintive car-alarms and the
sirens, Walkman playing. It was a slimline job, barely larger than the tape,
burnished silver like a very flash cigarette case. The C90 was a compilation
IтАЩd made up of techno and bleep stuff, vinyl picked up from Oldham Road
in Manchester, plus chart house grooves and a little main-stream
electro-soul, chanteuse-fronted, allegedly direct from the smokiest Berlin
bars. Ultra-pure digital sounds, hypnotic synth lines, speedily distorted
vocals. It was the music they played at the Drome, wall-to-wall, no dicking
about, mind-pummelling noise, repetitive as Tibetan mantras, as fast as
Bhangra. Allied to the DromeтАЩs effects, intense light pro-jected through a
rotating filter wheel of tinted, immiscible fluids . . . like a kaleidoscope
melting before your eyes, the sound washing over like a test-signal for your
sozzled brain. IтАЩd been into it for a year or two now, and finding that the
scene was established in Newcastle made up for the wrench IтАЩd felt leaving
the north-west, where the nexus of the whole thing had originated. My BT
job was a piece of shit; it was the music, the club scene that I lived for.
What I didnтАЩt know, as I popped the last of the E, was that it was the music
that had drawn the Househunter to me.

IтАЩd been targeted in the Drome, it seemed, and when I left with my
friends, IтАЩd been followed. Discreetly; up town, lurking in the sidestreets,
until I left the pack. Shrewd, as if my walk home had been half expected.
And because of the Walkman, I didnтАЩt hear the footsteps (supposing any
were to be heard), as I walked around the civic boating lake.

It came suddenly; carotid-squeezing pressure around my neck. The
hood was ripped from my clothes, earplugs seized, the whole ensemble of
the Walkman hurled into the moon-streaked water. There was never any
doubt in my mind that IтАЩd been selected as a victim, not in that instant. I
knew it was the HousehunterтАЩs arm around me. And then something went
through my head - a thought IтАЩd probably shared now with a dozen others,
our one instance of solidarity. I realised that all the assumptions had been
wrong. Oh boy, theyтАЩd got it badly wrong. They werenтАЩt going to catch this
baby in a hurry. Not if they kept on thinking -