"Charles Stross - Remade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

Before I can finish the sentence Blondie leans over Kay's shoulder and spits in my face. "I demand
satisfaction." She has a voice like a diamond drill.
"Why?" I ask stonily, heart thumping with tension as I wipe my cheek. I can feel the rage building but I
force myself to keep it under control.

"You exist."

There's a certain look some post-rehab cases get while they're in the psychopathic dissociative stage, still
re-knitting the ravelled threads of their personality and memories into a new identity. The insensate anger
at the world, the existential hate, often directed at their previously whole self for putting them into this
world, naked and stripped of memories, generates its own dynamic. Wild black-eyed hatred and the
perfect musculature of the optimised phenotype combine to lend Blondie an intimidating, almost primal
presence. Nevertheless she's got enough self-control to issue a challenge before she attacks.

Kay, shy and much further advanced in recovery than either of us, cowers in her seat as Blondie glares at
me. That annoys me: Blondie's got no call to intimidate bystanders. And maybe I'm not as out of control
as I feel.

"In that case..." I slowly stand up, not breaking eye contact for a moment. "How about we take this to
the remilitarised zone? First death rules?"

"Yes," she hisses.

I glance at Kay: "Nice talking to you. Order me another drink. I'll be right back." I can feel her eyes on
my back as I follow Blondie to the gate to the RMZ. Which is right beside the bar.

Blondie pauses on the threshold. "After you," she says.

"Au contraire: Challenger goes first."

She glares at me one more time, clearly furious, then strides into the T-gate and blinks out. I wipe my
right palm on my leather kilt, grip the hilt of my sword, draw, and leap through the point-to-point
wormhole.

Duelling etiquette calls for the challenger to clear the gate by a good ten paces, but Blondie isn't in a good
mood and it is a very good thing that I'm on the defensive and ready to parry as I go through because
she's waiting ready to shove her sword through my abdomen on the spot.

She's fast and vicious and utterly uninterested in playing by the rules, which is fine by me because my own
existential rage now has an outlet and a face. The anger that has been eating me up since my surgery, the
hatred of the war criminals who forced me into this, of the person I used to be who surrendered to the
large-scale memory erasure - I can't even remember what sex I was, or how tall - has a focus, and on
the other end of her circling blade Blondie's face is a glow of concentration and fury to mirror my own.

This part of the remilitarised zone is modelled on a ruined city of old Urth, shattered postnuclear concrete
wastelands and strange creeping vegetation shrouding the statues of conquerors and the burned-out
wreckage of wheeled cars. We could be alone here, marooned on a planet uninhabited by other
sapientes. Alone to work out our grief and rage as the post-surgical fugue slowly dissipates.

Blondie tries to rush me and I fall back carefully, trying to spot some weakness in her attack. She prefers