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

The ratman sets their drinks down at the table.

"Too slow," Eva drawls and blows him to bloody fragments all over the plastic fascia of the bar.

"Eva," Harvey sighs, "are you listening?"

"Sure," says Eva. She drops on all fours and sniffs the ratman's roast remains

Harvey drains his drink. "Mixed a good cocktail," he says.

Eva grunts. Her mouth is full.

Wolfmen trace Six's scent, and find a house. It lies on a slant, mouthparts buried deep in the
conduit running under the road. Sawtooths drill the door to bits and find Alia in the bedroom. They
pin her to the wall with beetle limbs and chew off her clothing. Wolfmen slavering toxin and
mucus fling her to the futon; they rub themselves against her, wet her with their secretions,
deafen her with howls of orgasm.

When Alia starts to bleed Harvey Mishima calls off the beastmen and hands Alia a handkerchief.
Nanotech robots in Alia's blood have already repaired the physical damage done to her. The
purpose of the attack is to traumatise, not her body, but her mind. Even these limited objectives
have not been achieved. It hasn't worked. It never does. Alia, like all of them, has no soul. She
feels nothing.

Alia considers it likely that the human cultures' conquest of mortality and pain led directly to this
Fall.

This makes her a Recidivist.

Harvey offers her a pill. He smiles a smile she has seen many times before. "I am going to kill
you," he says, "either by beasts or by this little bomb. If your cooperation is satisfactory I will
detonate the bomb. If you have not swallowed the bomb, though, or if your behaviour is an any
other way unsatisfactory, I will let in the wolfmen."

Alia snatches the pill out his hand and swallows it. A few seconds later something green and
slimy blinks behind her eyes. Good. Alia is better equipped than Mishima realises. The snake icon
has confirmed that her tonsils have disarmed the bomb.

Mishima tells her to shower and when she returns to the bedroom he is naked. It will be that
kind of interrogation. Afterwards, when there is nothing more for her to open up to him, in the
physical as well as the semantic sense, they have a drink together. Mishima sips and smiles and
lies down on the bed, breathing rapidly in a shallow, gasping manner that reminds her of
vivisected beastmen.

It is time. She calls up her Wisdom. It is a sophisticated black market system which can alter
the data stored in other units based upon the simplest of semantic instructions.

Alia tells her Wisdom to keep beastmen and other callers away from the house. It goes to work
and befuddles the beastmen and all the other paraphernalia of a Census Enquiry.