"Charles Stross - Generation Gap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

We sat in a ruddy earthlit glade, with the sun a glowing patch twenty degrees above
the horizon. The trees were perennial, from some subtropical zone тАУ a sweet, sickly stench
rose from them, mingling with the burnt-meat smell of a Goliath beetle that Piet had cornered
and slaughtered noisily. You'd be surprised how big they grow here. All seven of us were
around. We'd taken hours to reach this place, high among the foothills near the edge of the
dome.
The location appealed to my aesthetic sensibilities. My muse was noting pastoral
scenes from my optic chiasma; I downloaded some sensations to Lunar Administrative Zone,
who swallowed the engram without complaint. I watched Piet as he spitted the beetle under a
Fresnel lens held by Hammurabi. Hammurabi never complained; he was a dark, silent,
beautiful child. All he wanted was to be loved. I think Piet had promised to love him after the
feast тАУ an archetypical social algorithm within our gang. I'll never know, now.
A smoky aerosol containing appetising oxidation products drifted towards me. I
sniffed, salivating. Jerzy squatted near the cooks and broke off two substantial legs. He
brought one of them to me like some kind of pre-space savage in g-string and war paint. The
paint was blood; we were here to help LAZ with ecological control, culling landpussies where
they clustered and squirmed too thickly in the branches.
I accepted the joint and he collapsed in a heap beside me. Very black hair, Jerzy,
long and oiled and falling in ringlets, and dark skin engineered in among the genes of his
caucasian precursors. He's regular/dominant so we don't often interact positively, but
sometimes his presence has a strange effect on me.
"Farida my lovely, why is it тАУ " he paused тАУ "that when I look at you I feel as if my
eyes are deceiving me?"
I bit into the leg before replying; spat out a fragment of shell and chewed on the hot,
spicy meat inside.
"Unlikely," I said, when my mouth was vacant enough for polite speech. "Didn't you
have them replaced just before Landing Day?"
He looked annoyed. "Shit Farida, when I go to the trouble to script a dialogue for us
do you always have to ignore it?" I caught his meaning, consulted my Wisdom and felt
embarrassed. His objective was gentle seduction and physical copulation, in a sun-dappled
glade by a stream. Dropped silently into the database. The cliches were so old they weren't
even funny enough to laugh at; he meant it. I flushed prettily and felt selected bits of my
vascular system dilating in response.
"Okay!" I said; "Let's re-start." One for the memory banks. He smiled at me and said:
"Farida, why is it тАУ " pause тАУ "that when I look at you I feel as if my eyes are
deceiving me?"
I smiled at him knowingly and replied; "Beauty is only skin deep. Did you ever have
the inclination to get in underneath and find out where the real me begins?"
He put his left hand on my right thigh. It was slightly damp from holding the charred
beetle, and slightly hot. He put it right where I'd had trouble with an autonomic reflex, and he
knew it. I began to feel warm and wet. And all of a sudden I was irritated. "Break," I said,
chopping the air with my hands, palms turned downward.
He looked hurt. "What's wrong now?" he demanded.
I looked him in the eye, slightly abashed. "This isn't going to work. I don't need to hide
behind a dialogue box, and I don't like cliches, and I don't like hanging around!" I waited for a
dramatic response; sometimes impromptu outcuts make the best memories. But I had this
nagging sense тАУ even without my Wisdom тАУ that my deep meaning was being obscured by
noise. Jerzy looked confused now, as well as hurt. He took his hand away.
"Well, what do you want?" he asked, dangerously close to giving up. I reached over
and took his hand, not noticing Moira glaring at me, and stood up.