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

said quietly. "I don't know how many died; there's no way of telling. But all through that area тАУ
the pain тАУ"
"Then you must be, what? Sixty years old?" Sue asked. She wasn't spinning the chair
any more: she was staring at him, her face a sharply pointed question, hungry for answers.
"And still, you тАУ"
"Still," he said. "I'm not even settled down with a family. If I was human I would be an
old man, now. Retired to tend my bed of roses." Abruptly, he leaned forward and grabbed the
stack of ejected documents, stuffed them back into their file and returned them to their drawer
in exchange for another bundle. "They created the roses, you know? The humans. They bred
them, from earlier plants."
"I know," she said. "Just as now they're trying to redesign themselves to fit their own
desires. It's an interesting preoccupation ..."
Kris shuddered at the sight of her expression. "Pass the next file. What's your real
name?" he asked without looking up.
She told him.
"Well," he said, running his long, thin tongue along his lips as he stared at the control
panel: "you would do well to remember who you are, Sue, and think carefully about where
your loyalties lie. We're letting them play with fire, and you are sitting very close to the hearth.
There are those who would say that if you were to be burned it would be only your own fault."
She walked away from him, towards the window. "I say that as a friend," he added.
"There are other groups at work as well ..."
She turned round then, and Kris felt himself frozen by the black spike of her gaze. He
stared back at her unwaveringly. Something very ancient and very chilly passed between
them and he made a small gesture with his right hand, a relic of an upbringing in backwoods
Silesia. Behind them the photocopier whined on, unattended in its shadowy corner. "You
don't know what you're talking about," she said, her face relaxing into a shape that was both
alien and intimately familiar to Kristoph. "Believe me, genetic manipulation is perfectly safe,"
she added, baring inhumanly sharp teeth at him. "You can tell that to Ancient of Days. It's
safe as stones as long as we're in control. Safe as stones ..."

***
 Later, as soon as it could be arranged, five strangers gathered in impromptu
committee. There were no validated safe houses available in the city at present, and Ancient
of Days had insisted upon full security precautions being observed: therefore they met in the
a place normally maintained for serious emergencies, where interruption was unlikely.
The city sewer systems were more than a century old, and a lengthy program of
refurbishment had been under way for ten years now. Old brick-lined tunnels crumbled gently
beneath the pounding wheels of trucks and cars, and the new prefabricated concrete sewers
by-passed them completely. The original maps were in poor condition, many of them lost
during the war, and the old lore of the tunnel-walkers had dwindled as a result of modern
career mobility, but there were still some who knew where the ancient tunnels ran. One of
those summoned hence conference had spent years in similar tunnels under Bucharest; and
another had been around when they were built. And tonight, two nights after Kristoph's
twilight raid on the research group's offices, they were about to meet.
Slime wreathed the sewer, forming a tide-mark three-quarters of the way up the
rotting brick walls. Five metres below the streets of the city it was completely dark, and
Kristoph was forced to stoop over his lantern in order to keep his head from brushing the
ceiling. Jagged black shadows danced along the tunnel behind him like a retinue of silently
mocking mimics. Once a pair of close-set red eyes gleamed at him from an outflow: Kris
nodded at them as he shuffled towards the meeting place. There was no telling where