"Rudy Rucker - Freeware" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

"So what do you do with a mark after you bleed him dry?" asked Xlotl. "Make him shoot
himself? Have him swan-dive off a building to cave in his skull?"

"The direct control of a cheeseball must be of limited temporal duration," said Andrea.
"Otherwise the danger of discovery becomes too great. And it is indeed essential that the
cheeseball be terminated in such a way that no trace of the user's thinking cap can be
found in his remains. Do you want to hear what I did to Quayoom and Kimball? About
how I helped them follow their death angels Moroni and Izra'il into the beyond?"
"Oh yes," cried Monique and Xlotl.

"I directed them each to swim a mile out into the ocean at night and tread water there
until hypothermia enabled them to drown. Once the subject had experienced brain death,
I had my thinking cap crawl out of his nose and swim like a fish to meet me, waiting upon
the shore."

"Whoah, that's cold," said Monique.
"Many fleshers would treat us with equal severity," said Andrea primly. "And remember,
dear Monique, it is only by these means that I was able to acquire sufficient resources to
continue my life after having given birth to you and Xanana. Would you deny your own
mother the chance to rejuvenate herself? Moldie flesh is exorbitantly precious. Certainly
you wouldn't want to stoop to victimizing other moldies instead of fleshers. I've heard
that's what the loonie moldies do. You wouldn't want to be like them."

So when the hillbilly cheeseball solicited Monique from the door of Room 3D, she started
thinking about giving him a thinking capтАФthinking a mile a minute. Should she? Could
she? Dare she try?

Just then Xlotl's voice spoke up in Monique's head. "Time for lunch break, baby. Meet me
down at the beach?" The Los Trancos Taco Bar liked Xlotl to take an hour or more off
around noon, so that his presence wouldn't repel people wanting to have lunch. In
principle, Xlotl could have sealed his pores and become nearly odorless, but human
prejudice ran deep. It was better not to have him in the place when a lot of folks were
eating.

"Totally," thought back Monique. "There's something I want to discuss with you in
person." Due to the irredeemable promiscuity of electromagnetic radiation, no uvvy link
could be secure enough for planning murder.
Monique waved enticingly to the cheeseball behind his green-and-red-stickered window
glass, then flounced down the stairs to Beach Street.
A moldie bus full of tourists went quietly pattering past, followed by five moldies acting as
rickshaws and carrying individual people. Monique boinged around them, chirping hellos
to the ones that she recognized, and then she was on the beach. Looking up the hill toward
the Los Trancos Taco Bar, Monique could see her darling husband hopping toward her.
Xlotl resembled his wife MoniqueтАФhe was shaped like a coppery Aztec chessman with a
mouth like a purple slash in his face.

He bounced right into Monique, whooping wildly, and they wrapped their arms around
each other and went rolling down toward the water. They came to rest at surf's edge and
lay there writhing in a sexual embrace, each of them pushing branching tendrils deep and
deeper into the other's body.