"Charles Stross - Ancient Of Days" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

within was darkened. He pushed the door open and reached around it for the light switch,
every nerve straining for signs of potential trouble. But there was nothing amiss: it was just
another night-time office, plastic covers drooping over the copier and word processors. He
breathed out slowly, willing the muscles in his arms to relax as he looked around. There were
papers in every in-tray, filing cabinets full of pre-publication data: he rubbed the skeleton keys
in his pocket. The soul of a research group lay exposed to his midnight fingers, so prosaic an
institution that it seemed ridiculous to connect it to some hideous, numinous threat to the
survival of the race. But that was what Ancient of Days had said тАУ and Kris knew full-well,
with the bitterness of experience, that when Ancient of Days spoke, everyone listened.
Kris went to work with a precision that was born of long experience. First he closed
the venetian blinds; then he switched on the photocopier and went to work on the first of the
filing cabinets as it warmed up. His brief-case he placed upon a nearby desk, opening it to
reveal two reams of lightweight copier paper: why bother with toys like Minox spy-cams, his
trainers had once explained, when any well-run office provides all the tools you need? He
whistled as he worked, in an effort to forget the snow on the window ledge. If it wasn't for that
damned snow, with its burden of remembered horrors preying on his mind, he might even
admit that he was happy.
There was a knock on the door. Kristoph spun round then relaxed, recognizing that it
was Sue: a slight catch in her breath and the way she shifted her balance on the floor outside
gave her away. "Come in," he said, turning back to examine the suspension files in the top
drawer of the first cabinet.
She opened the door. "Your coffee," she said, placing the cup next to his case. "Any
idea how long you'll be?"
He yawned, baring teeth as white as those of an actor in a toothpaste commercial.
"You tell me. If there's not much to lift from the project files, then ..."
"You're in the wrong cabinet for the research data," she observed, looking over his
shoulder. "That's all departmental admin. The interesting stuff is filed in the drawers marked
Homoeobox Research Group. Funded by the Human Genome Project, natch."
"It's all greek to me," said Kris, turning to the indicated cabinet. Greece, yes ... and
the partisans in the hill country ... he stamped on the memory. Maybe I've been around too
long, he thought bleakly. The generation gap is widening all the time.
"I shouldn't worry about it," she replied, sitting down in a chair in front of one of the
word processors. "Change overtakes us all. This shit is so new it's all developed since I left
school."
"How long ago was that?" Kristoph asked, picking out the first file and carrying it
across to the copier.
"Ten years since I took 'A' levels," she said, "then a batchelor's degree, Masters, Phd
and research for the past two years. I'm in a different field, though. She rolled her chair round,
craning her head back to stare at the ceiling. "Polysaccharide chemistry, not ontological
genetics. They've made huge breakthroughs in the past ten years, you know. How long is it
since you were at school?"
Kris laughed. "I was never at school," he said, stacking papers face-down in the
feeder tray. "At least not as you know it. I learned to read and write in primary school with the
other children, but then the dictator's men came. Ideology was in the driver's seat, and there
were secret police тАУ night and mist тАУ and identity papers to contend with. We couldn't move
as freely as we did before all this modern nonsense. I went into the army at sixteen because I
was a young fool and thought it was a good way to get away from home, to lose myself
among millions of other young men; I didn't understand about humans then."
He fell silent for a while, watching the sharp-edged shadows moving on the wall
behind the photocopier. I don't think I should have told her that. "We suffered in that war," he