"Allison Sinclair - Assassin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sinclair Allison)

"Give me some credit, Mouse. I'm looking for unexplained suicides of people with
active mood inplants."
"You think such a creature exists. People don't go for mood mod and synthesis
because they're happy with their lives and want to get happier--" No, I thought,
let's leave that. "So what you think is that the assassin fed our lady a downer,
and she jumped."
"Or upper. Send the correct set of overrides to a mood implant, and bang,
instant florid schizophrenia. She may have thought she was a bird. Or the room
was on fire. Or God was telling her she was an angel.... Whatever."
"I'm surprised," I said, after a moment, "you found it."
"So am I. Somebody's been careless, or there was some inhibitor in this PC's
system."
"Well, live right and maybe the dAIty'll smile on you."



Glad and I lunched in The Caverns, the developer's answer to city-center space
limitation, five levels, going down. We patronize a salad joint called Charon's
on the Styx--wonderful soup, don't ask where they grow the greens. Over salad
and soup we talked about life, the universe, men and everything. Glad had met
someone new; or someone else, anyway. Everything she said fitted a pattern; it
wasn't going to last. Glad knew how to pick them for a short good time and no
lasting regrets. I envied her. My layover, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, had been
one long argument, latest installment of an even longer argument. Errel had
become convinced he was missing out, careerwise, relationshipwise--he wanted to
have input nodes implanted, mood and memory nodes. Fine; it was his brain and
his bank account. But he wanted me along. He talked about our relationship; I
talked about my work. I knew I wasn't telling him the truth and I had the
feeling he wasn't telling me everything, so it went round and round.
"The latest," I told Glad, "is that now he's started talking about changing his
name back to Joshua, and going home for a visit." I pushed a slice of tomato to
the side of the plate: the blacklighting in Charon's on the Styx picked up a
faintly iridescent, unhealthy sheen on its skin. Probably badly washed. Glad's
eyes and teeth flashed purple-white.
"Home as in West."
"That's right. Talks about his parents getting older. Mellowing. I bit my
tongue. Nothing he's ever said to me suggested they'd be the type to mellow. The
only way he'd get back--or half way back--would be by casting himself as
cautionary parable for the rest of his life."
"What about the girl he was supposed to have married?"
"Happily married, he understands. The innocent wonders how she can have any
grudge."
Glad nodded understanding. Sarah was the girl Errel who was Joshua was to have
married, at the age of seventeen, until he glimpsed before him a life like his
father's and grandfather's and great-grandfather's ... fifty, sixty, seventy
years in a time-slipped enclave, punishing, denying, mortifying his curiosity.
But even that he could have endured, he said, if he had not also seen himself in
twelve years time laying righteous punishment on the back of a daughter or son
into whom he had bred that curiosity. And so he had left a letter to his
intended bride in the roadside postbox, amongst the letters of congratulation