"Bruce Sterling - Bicycle Repairman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

BICYCLE REPAIRMAN
by BRUCE STERLING



[VERSION 1.2 (Mar 04 04). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version
number by 0.1 and redistribute.]



First published in Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology, edited by John Kessel, Mark L.
Van Name and Richard Butner, 1996.



Repeated tinny banging woke Lyle in his hammock. Lyle groaned, sat up, and slid free into
the tool-crowded aisle of his bike shop.
Lyle hitched up the black elastic of his skintight shorts and plucked yesterday's grease-stained
sleeveless off the workbench. He glanced blearily at his chronometer as he picked his way toward
the door. It was 10:04.38 in the morning, June 27, 2037.
Lyle hopped over a stray can of primer and the floor boomed gently beneath his feet. With all
the press of work, he'd collapsed into sleep without properly cleaning the shop. Doing custom
enameling paid okay, but it ate up time like crazy. Working and living alone was wearing him
out.
Lyle opened the shop door, revealing a long sheer drop to dusty tiling far below. Pigeons
darted beneath the hull of his shop through a soot-stained hole in the broken atrium glass, and
wheeled off to their rookery somewhere in the darkened guts of the high-rise.
More banging. Far below, a uniformed delivery kid stood by his cargo tricycle, yanking
rhythmically at the long dangling string of Lyle's spot-welded doorknocker.
Lyle waved, yawning. From his vantage point below the huge girders of the cavernous atrium,
Lyle had a fine overview of three burnt-out interior levels of the old Tsatanuga Archiplat. Once-
elegant handrails and battered pedestrian overlooks fronted on the great airy cavity of the atrium.
Behind the handrails was a three-floor wilderness of jury-rigged lights, chicken coops, water
tanks, and squatters' flags. The fire-damaged floors, walls, and ceilings were riddled with
handmade descent-chutes, long coiling staircases, and rickety ladders.
Lyle took note of a crew of Chattanooga demolition workers in their yellow detox suits. The
repair crew was deploying vacuum scrubbers and a high-pressure hose-off by the vandal-proofed
western elevators of Floor 34. Two or three days a week, the city crew meandered into the
damage zone to pretend to work, with a great hypocritical show of sawhorses and barrier tape.
The lazy sons of bitches were all on the take.
Lyle thumbed the brake switches in their big metal box by the flywheel. The bike shop
slithered, with a subtle hiss of cable-clamps, down three stories, to dock with a grating crunch
onto four concrete-filled metal drums.
The delivery kid looked real familiar. He was in and out of the zone pretty often. Lyle had
once done some custom work on the kid's cargo trike, new shocks and some granny-gearing as he
recalled, but he couldn't remember the kid's name. Lyle was terrible with names. "What's up,
zude?"
"Hard night, Lyle?"
"Just real busy."
The kid's nose wrinkled at the stench from the shop. "Doin' a lot of paint work, huh?" He