"Rudy Rucker & John Shirley - Pockets" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

"Dad!"
Dad looked at himтАФif it could be called looking. In the thrall of the Out-Monkey it
more like he was going through the motions of turning his attention to Wendel, and that atten
was represented by the image of an attentive paternal face. "Wendel, I don't think I can get
It's snagging my ..." His voice was lost in a surging crackle, a wave of static. Then: "
purple, thinking purple . . ." Crackle. ". . . your mom! It wants us!"
Wendel's arm ached where Threakman clutched him. "We gotter go soon, mate!" said
scarred pocket-slug.
Mom turned her attention toward Wendel, too, nowтАФshe was reaching for
weeping and laughing at once. He wasn't sure if it was psychic or vocal, but he heard her
"We're pets, Wendel!" Static. "Waterstriders penned in a corner of the pond." His mot
face was lit with unholy bliss. "Live bumper stickers." A sick peal of laughter.
There was another ripple in the space around them, and all of a sudden Mom and Dad w
only a few feet away. Close enough to touch. Wendel reached out to them.
"Come on, Mom! Take my hand! Jeremy and IтАФwe can pull you out! You can leave if
want to!"
How Wendel knew this, he wasn't sure. But he knew it was true. He could feel itтАФco
feel the relative energy loci, the possibility of pulling free, if you tried.
 "We can go home, Dad! You and me and Mom!"
"Can't!" came his Dad's voice from a squirming gargoyle of his father with a fractal fri
weeping and laughing.
"Dad don't lie to me! You can do it! Don't lie! You can come! . . ."
His arm ached soтАФbut he waited for the answer.
Wordlessly, his father emanated regret. Remorse. Shame. "Yes," he adm
finally. "But I choose this. Mom and I . . . we want to stay here. Part of the gorg
Out-Monkey. The eternal fractals." Static. "... can't help it. Go away, Wendel!"
"Have a life, Wendel!" Mom said. Several versions of her face said it, several diffe
ways. "Don't come back. The nanomatrixтАФyou can melt it. Acid!" Huge burst of static. "H
up now. It heard me!"
He felt it, too: the chilling black-light search-beam of the Out-Monkey's atten
spotlighting him like an escaped prisoner just outside the wall. . .
"No, Mom! Come back! MomтАФ"
Mom and Dad swirled away from him, their faces breaking up into laughing, jabbe
fractals. The white noise grew intolerably loud.
"Gotter leave!" screamed Threakman in his ear. "Jump!"
With an impulse that was as much resentment of running away in fury as it w
conscious effort, he leapt with Threakman away from the hardening grip of the Out-Mon
and felt himself spinning out through the dimensions and down the tunnels, he and Threakma
a whirling blur, one almost blending with the other . . . he thought he caught a glimps
Threakman's memories, bleeding over in the strange ambient fields of the place from
companion's mind: a father with a leather strap, a woman giving him his first blow job in
backroom of a Sydney bar, his first paycheck, being mugged in London, a stout woman an
leaving him . . . All this time Threakman was steering him through the bent spaces, helping
find his way back.
And then their minds were discrete again, and they were flying through a vortex effaces
pearly-gray glimmer, through a symmetrical lattice of copies of themselves, back out into
Big Bubble space he'd first entered. And just about then the bubble flattened down into no
spaceтАФand burst. He was back in the World.
Wendel knelt in the huge lab room, sobs of fury bubbling out of him, beside the floor m
the little nanomatrix, slapping his palm flat on the floor, again and again, in his frustration