"Justina Robson - Silver Screen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robson Justina)

He kept on playing.
тАШHello?тАЩ Jane said in disgust. тАШI said you havenтАЩtтАФтАЩ
тАШI heard you,тАЩ he said. тАШBut isnтАЩt it beautiful? The doomed flight to certain
death?тАЩ The maze in which he was flying curled around his wings smoothly.
Jane snorted her opinion.
Roy turned the machine into a slow spiral around its short axis and let go of it.
We all watched as it slammed into the wall and exploded in a brilliant burst of blue
and white. Play Again? the screen asked, typing the question over the scorchmark.
Instant resurrection.
тАШWant a go?тАЩ He stripped the gloves off and held them out to me.
тАШNo. No thanks,тАЩ I said quickly, terrified in case they were going to make me
play it and I would show myself up.
тАШWell, I will,тАЩ he said and put them back on.
Jane made a noise of irritation and, finding nothing else to do, walked out, not
even awarding me a second look.
Things stayed pretty much the same all through school. Jane alternated
between slightly puzzled efforts to become friendly and bleak periods of excessive
introversion, the timing of which was erratic and unpredictable and unchanged by
puberty or adulthood. Roy was the other beat of the pulsar. Manic and frequently
disruptive in classes, they eventually gave him private tuition in separate rooms. In
private he remained closeted, but in a different way from Jane. Roy was mostly alone
because he was sufficient to himself. He was happy to see me, and if we didnтАЩt quite
have a conventional friendship then we had some-thing like it, so close you couldnтАЩt
make the call. Somewhere in the wider world kids in their teens loitered in shop
doorways late at night, smoked a pooled ten gaspers and crammed their mouths with
pay-by-weight sweets. They engaged in friendly bouts of scuffling and sat on damp
kerbs and felt estranged. We sat in the dorm and talked big technology. The feelings
were much the same, deep and loyal and illogical, and absolutely and utterly beyond
any kind of comment.
That was one of the beginnings.
Life there was regimented up to a point. Each of us had a room with sink and
mirror, a wardrobe, a bed and a worksta-tion. Lucky ones got a little window, which
might look out east towards the farmhouse or west onto the playing fields
over-grown with couch grass and dandelions, where seldom a ball was kicked
except to prove some point about vectors or gravity. There was a swimming pool
shaped like the joined kidneys of Siamese twins to the rear of the farmhouse and
there was a cinder running track of distinctly unambitious proportions alongside a
tangled apple orchard. We were made to go out for exercise each day for half an
hour, but this was the one place where only token effort was ever required by the
staff. However, competition among some kids was so relentlessly fierce that it
couldnтАЩt rest for a moment, and a large contingent of the school was тАУ as well as
being studious and clever тАУ fighting fit. On the announcement boards outside my
room there was a constantly updated list of the best mile times, to thousandths of a
second. The bottom of the list was somewhere in the eight-minute league. I had the
time, but Anjuli OтАЩConnell, my name, did not appear on it at all. Ever. Only Jane
sometimes deigned to carve out the odd six-minuter as part of the regular assertion
of her natural superiority.
The reason my name never appeared on the mile board and the reason I had
been estranged at my first school, and needed someone so badly at this one, were
one and the same. All of Berwick competed in the skills of intelligence and memory