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

upper palate.
"Good," said Dr. Mirabi. "Breathe!"
Alex tried again, his eyes bulging. His spine popped audibly and he
felt another pair of great loathsome bubbles come up, stinking
ancient bubbles like something from the bottom of LaBrea.
Then suddenly the oxygen hit his brain. An orgasmic blush ran up his
neck, his cheeks. For a supreme moment he forgot what it was to be
sick. He felt lovely. He felt free. He felt without constraint. He
felt pretty sure that he was about to die.
He tried to speak, to babble something-gratitude perhaps, or last
words, or an eager yell for more-but there -was only silence. His
lungs were like two casts of and bonemeal, each filled to brimming
with hot ber. His muscles heaved against the taut liquid bags two
fists clenching two tennis balls, and his ears road and things went
black. Suddenly he could hear his straining to beat, thud-thud, thud-
thud, each coau
shock of the ventricles passing through his liquid-filled lungs with
booming subaqueous clarity.
And then the beat stopped too.


ON THE EVENING of May 10, Jane Unger made a reconnaissance of her
target, on the pretext of buying heroin. She spent half an hour in
line outside the clinic with desolate, wheezing Yankees from over the
border. The customers lined outside the clinic were the seediest,
creepiest, most desperate people she'd ever seen who were not actual
criminals. Jane was familiar with the look of actual criminals,
because the vast network of former Texas prisons had been emptied of
felons and retrofitted as medical quarantine centers and emergency
weather shelters. The former inhabitants of the Texan gulag, the
actual criminals, were confined by software nowadays. Convicted
criminals, in their tamper-proof parole cuffs, couldn't make it down
to Nuevo Laredo, because they'd be marooned on the far side of the
Rio Grande by their 6overnment tracking software. Nobody in the
clinic line wore a parole cuff. But they were clearly the kind of
people who had many good friends wearing them.
All of the American customers, without exception, wore sinister
breathing masks. Presumably to avoid contracting an infection. Or to
avoid spreading an infection that they already had. Or probably just
to conceal their identities while they bought drugs.
The older customers wore plain ribbed breathing masks in antiseptic
medical white. The younger folks were into elaborate knobby strap-ons
with vivid designer colors.
The line of Americans snaked along steadily, helped by the presence
of a pair of Mexican cops, who kept the local street hustlers off the
backs of the paying clientele. Jane patiently made her way up the
clinic steps, through the double doors, and to the barred and
bulletproof glass of the pharmacy windows.
There Jane discovered that the clinic didn't sell any "brown Mexican
heroin." Apparently they had no "heroin" at all in stock, there being