"Christopher Rowe - The Voluntary State" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rowe Christopher)

"Ring," said the telephone.
"Hello," said Jenny.
Jenny's Operator sounded just like Jenny, something else
that secretly disturbed her. Other people's Operators sounded
like television stars or famous Legislators or like happy
cartoon characters, but Jenny was in that minority of people
whose Operators and Teachers always sounded like
themselves. Jenny remembered a slogan from Campaign, "My
voice is yours."
"The Tennessee Highway Patrol has plucked one already,
Jenny Healer." The voice from the telephone thickened
around Jenny and began pouring through her ears like cold
syrup. "But we want a sample of this one as well. Hold that
feather, Jenny, and open your head a little wider."
****
14
 The Voluntary State
by Christopher Rowe




Now, here's the secret of those feathers. The one Jenny
gave to the police and the one the cluenets had caught
already. The secret of those feathers, and the feathers strung
like look-here flags along the trails down from the Girding
Wall, and even of the Owl feathers that had pushed through
that fence and let the outside in. All of them were oily with
intrigue. Each had been dipped in potent math, the
autonomous software developed by the Owls of the
Bluegrass.
Those feathers were hacks. They were lures and false
attacks. Those feathers marked the way the Kentuckians
didn't go.
The math kept quiet and still as it floated through Jenny's
head, through the ignorable defenses of the telephone and
the more considerable, but still avoidable, rings of barbed
wire around Jenny's Operator. The math went looking for a
Detective or even a Legislator if one were to be found not
braying in a pack of its brethren, an unlikely event.
The math stayed well clear of the Commodores in the
Great Salt Lick ringing the Parthenon. It was sly math. Its
goals were limited, realizable. It marked the way they didn't
go.
****


The Crows made Soma carry things. "You're stronger than
you think," one said and loaded him up with a sloshing keg
made from white oak staves. A lot of the Crows carried such,