"Charles Stross - Tarkovsky's Cut" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

Jessie. She remembers Jessie. Being with him made her feel -- human.

Something scuffs the dirt at her feet. She looks down, and locks eyes with a timorous mouse.

"Back again?" she says.

"I am your new assignment," it pipes. Alia picks it up and bites its head off. The warm fur makes
her gag, as usual.

The hind legs, abandoned, twitch helplessly in the dust.

Jewel writhes about the bed, masturbating herself with whatever bits of Hyne will fit. The blood
is starting to cake.

The cupboard is open and the skeletons are shrieking. As she attains orgasm she looks at
them and smiles, because the skeletons all have souls, and she knows it will hurt them.

Jessie is paying no attention. He is playing Cat's Cradle with a string of fibre-optic.

Jewel leaps out of bed and slips on Hyne's small intestine.

Jessie looks up and laughs.

Jewel gets up and strides toward the cupboard. "What's that?" she shouts at him. "Where did
you get that?"

Hyne tangles the wire between the skeletal fingers of his right hand. His cybernetic eyes whirr
as he focusses upon his mistress. "Hyne gave it to me."

Jewel is speechless.

"But then, you wouldn't understand that."

The other skeletons shudder and fall silent, listening. There are six of them. Heaven Eleven has
produced seven souls in the past ten thousand years. They are all here, Jessie and his more
timorous fellows. Secure. Locked in the cupboard.

"Give me the string," Jewel says.

"Certainly --" and Jessie lifts the hand with the string in it, opens his bony fingers, and slaps her.

Jewel puts her hand to her face; Hyne's blood is sticky on her cheek. She thinks hard what to
do. She thinks to turn him off. But that is not enough. She needs him. She needs them all, to
advise her, to give her the edge, the edge that brought her to this place, and built up the Folded
Rose Sanctuary atop the ruins of a former Jewel's domain, four thousand years ago.

She thinks hard and in time, slowly, painfully, she gives birth to an idea. She turns and goes
back to the bed, and brings back fleshy garlands for Jessie, loops them around his pelvis,
shoulders and shoulder blades. He does not resist. She plucks out his eyes and dashes them to