"Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Smart machines lurked about the suite, their power lights in the
shuttered dimness like the small red eyes of bats. The machines
crouched in inches in white walls of Mexican stucco: an ionizer, a
television, a smoke alarm, a squad of motion sensors. A vaporizer
hissed and bubbled gently in the corner, emitting a potent reek of
oil, ginseng, and eucalyptus.
Alex lay propped on silk-cased pillows, his feet and knees denting
the starched cotton sheets. His flesh felt like wet clay, something
greased and damp and utterly inert. Since morning he had been huffing
at the black neoprene mask of his bedside inhaler, and now his
fingertips, gone pale as wax and lightly trembling, seemed to be
melting into the mask. Alex thought briefly of hanging the mask from
its stainless-steel hook at the bedside medical rack. He rejected the
idea. It was too much of a hassle to have the tasty mask out of
reach.
The pain in his lungs and throat had not really gone away. Such a
miracle was perhaps too much to ask, even of a Mexican black-market
medical clinic. Nevertheless, after
two weeks of treatment in the dinica, his pain had assumed a new
subtlety. The scorched inflammation had dwindled to an interestingly
novel feeling, something thin and rather theoretical.
The suite was as chilly as a fishbowl and Alex felt as cozy and as
torpid as a carp. He lay collapsed in semidarkness, cyes blinking
grainily, as a deeper texture of his illness languorously revealed
itself. Beneath his starched sheets, Alex began to feel warm. Then
light-headed. Then slightly nauseous, a customary progression of
symptoms. He felt the dark rush build within his chest.
Then it poured through him. He felt his spine melting. He seemed to
percolate into the mattress.
These spells had been coming more often lately, and with more power
behind them. On the other hand, their dark currents were taking Alex
into some interesting places. Alex, not breathing, swam along
pleasantly under the rim of unconsciousness for a long moment.
Then, without his will, breath came again. His mind broke delirium's
surface. When his eyes reopened, the suite around him seemed
intensely surreal. Crawling walls of white stucco, swirling white
stucco ceiling, thick wormy carpet of chemical aqua blue. Bulbous
pottery lamps squatted unlit on elaborate wicker tables. The chest of
drawers, and the bureau, the wooden bedframe were all marked with the
same creepy conspiracy of aqua-blue octagons. ... Iron-hinged wooden
shutters guarded the putty-sealed windows. A dying tropical
houseplant, the gaunt rubber-leafed monster that had become his most
faithful companion here, stood in its terra-cotta pot, gently
poisoned by the constant darkness, and the medicated vaporous
damp....
A sharp buzz sounded alongside his bed. Alex twisted his matted head
on the pillow. The machine buzzed again. Then, yet again.
Alex realized with vague surprise that the machine was a telephone.
He had never received any calls on the telephone in his suite. He did
not even know that he had one. The elderly, humble machine had been