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

"The Old Man?"
That 'Old Man' made me set my teeth. One of the reasons we had come to be in
this room together was Errel had always had exquisite judgment in the taking of
liberties. Lately, though, his judgment seemed to have coarsened. Or maybe I was
just oversensitive; even his squad used to call D'Inde The Old Man.
The problem was, then it hadn't been a joke, and now it wasn't.
I put a hand down on my pantsuit leg, and watched an aura of blue grow around
it, as my body heat reached it.
"Every time I go there I have to hold back from hitting the therapist who
burbles on about how much they've been able to do for him. All I can think about
is the D'Inde I knew wouldn't have let them wire up his brain."
The blue developed a slight tinge of green around my fingers and palm.
"He'd have preferred to have been a vegetable? Or dead?"
"How should I know?" People who picked up that I wasn't thrilled at the miracles
of modern medical technology kept asking me that. I didn't have an answer. The
only person who could answer that was a man who no longer was. The green became
a distinct band, within the blue.
"One of the worst things about it all," I heard myself say, "is purely selfish.
That man knew things about me that aren't even on record, that don't even exist
in any form other than in my memory and in his. Now that's gone, because they
can only give him back what's on record. I feel as though part of me has
vanished along with part of him."
Like the person I used to be, before I became Lester.
"Well," Errel said, sliding his hand down my shoulder, "maybe some day you'll
want to tell someone else these things."
I did not know whether to let myself melt or be furious; to avoid the decision,
I stood up and returned the thermosuit to its bin and pulled down a plain black
catsuit and mood-bead veil, small but pricy, because of the EEG circuitry. I saw
Errel's smile framed by indigo. "You are down," he said, softly.
"I told you I was," I said, unable to prevent myself from stressing told.
"No, don't take them off," he said. "I want to apologise, and I'd like to
see--if it takes."
"We used to be able to do that without light-effects."
"We thought we did," he said. "I've had the feeling that maybe we were--maybe we
didn't understand each other as well as we thought."
I kept my eyes on his face, not on the slivers of yellow crowning his head.
"What do you mean?"
"Les, I've always wanted to know what I missed; I thought you understood that."
"I get 'planted, I go on the Nets, I can't work Virus-squad any more."
"We don't have to go on the Nets."
"You'll want to know what comes next, won't you?" I was distracted by a colour
change at my peripheral vision, green changing to yellow, on its way to red, if
I were not so--so what? The beads could only indicate simple emotion, and mine
were anything but. The yellow fixed, and I watched his eyes shift from one side
to the other, waiting for them to change, and then reached up and janked the
whole apparatus off. "Now watch my face," I told him. "And listen: I'll tell you
what I feel. I'm wondering what happened to the man who moved in with me,
because I don't think it has anything to do with proper understandings or not.
I'm not standing in the way of your getting yourself implanted, but don't
pressure me to follow and make out that our relationship will be nothing if we