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

sky, a bleeding swirl that becomes more complex the longer she looks at it. This is where she
goes when she swallows the messengers: it is not hot, or cold, or wet, or dry, not good, not bad.
It terrifies her. She stares up at the sky. She can see shapes in it, if she looks for long enough.

You are marked, says the wind. The Sanctuary of the Folded Rose is watching you. You are
vulnerable. You have one opportunity left to assassinate Jewel. Sources suggest that Jewel will
drown herself in the Lagoon tomorrow.

Alia gasps but has no body to gasp with. "So soon?" The air itself breathes her words. All the
planning, the preparation, the deaths of Six and Harvey Mishima -- all outplayed by a whim of
Jewel's frayed psyche!

She has seventy lifetimes with which to play. She can afford to be self-indulgent. Perhaps she
is bored, You will be supplied with a once-only field retread virus -- one configured so your
Wisdom can insinuate it into Jewel's own Wisdom interface. You will swim in the lagoon. You will
port the virus into her as she drowns. When the Census dredges her, there will be no 'her' to fill
her next incarnation.

Then the sun goes out.

Jewel stands on the deck of the houseboat and contemplates the still black waters beneath.

Ten thousand years. For ten thousand years Heaven Eleven has promised the culture a cure
for the Fall, a recreation of the human soul.

For ten thousand years it has taken the culture's money, keeping it poor, poor enough to have to
expand, to fill the galaxy with rings, oneils, terraformed planets, mining colonies, spaceships and
diracs and all the paraphernalia of a Galaxy spanning culture. For ten thousand years it had given
the human culture a purpose.

And it has done so by doing nothing but amass that money, investing just enough to convince
the culture it still has a place, a role to play, a right to exist and grow rich. It is the logic of a
machine, trapped in a closed loop for eternity.
 And it has been enough. Until. Until.

Jessie.

As if he's heard her thoughts, and perhaps he has, Jessie comes on-line through her Wisdom.
The sharkmen have caught Alia half a mile off the coast. She got nibbled a bit but nothing her own
nanotechs can't deal with.

Jewel sighs. She fingers the jewel around her neck, and then, for the first time in many lifetimes,
she looks at it. She examines the play of light in the stone. She stares into it for many minutes. It
is such a strange thing.

At last she stirs herself. "Bring the silly bitch to me," she says.

The nanotechs have closed me down Alia realises. She remembers cold and dark and no
weight and teeth, everywhere. Teeth. It comes back to her.