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

The lagoon.

Sharkmen.

She wonders if she is dead yet.

The grey place is flat. It curves up at the horizon. There are no hard edges to the gravel beneath
her feet -- this is a landscape scoured smooth by time. It is, she thinks, a fitting afterlife for a
soulless woman.

She looks up. They are all there, in the sky. All the mythical ideograms of humanity. The
fractured swastika, its edges dissolved into broken geometries -- a pentangle tracing a circle of
coppery fire -- a six-pointed figure -- all the archetypes are here. Strange symbols float in the
darkness, receding in ranks as far as she can see.

Alia lies on her back and stared at the lights in the sky. She has an idea that they are a
command overlay of some extremely powerful communications net. You could look at the
commands and trigger them, if you knew the correct control mode. Ask and you shall receive --

What?

The deepest of deep meanings?

A personality?

You're not dying. You have been immobilised by a motor/afferent nerve block. You are
supposed to be asleep and you are. This is a lucid dream state -- a communications mode.

"Who are you?" Her voice is thin and reedy. All of a sudden, she becomes aware that she is
naked, and her body -- She rubs her hands over herself. She very young -- a little girl, as if she'd
sprung fresh from a Domino tank. Fear overwhelms her.

We are your nest. You don't see us because you're on the sharp edge of the wedge. But we're
here, and we're watching. You have been captured and brought before Jewel. You are in luck.
This is the gateway to your retread programme. To trigger it, just pull yourself back here and your
Wisdom will detonate it.

Her stomach churns. Her feet tingle. A bright purple mouse skull outline lights up the sky -- and
it laughs.

It is a laugh she has heard before.
 The houseboat turns in the wind. Alia opens her eyes.

Jewel is pouring her a cup of coffee, and when she speaks, Jessie's way of talking works her
mouth.

Alia sits up. She is sore from where the sharkmen have bitten her, but her Wisdom tells her no
serious harm has been done.

"Machines," says Jewel, or Jessie, or both, and Alia doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry, or