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

When she'd finished porch she cleaned the path. The house stood up so she could sweep the
rubbish underneath it. The path, by contrast, was a lifeless thing, made of concrete, and the
concrete was broken. Weeds grew in the cracks. Sometimes she washed the weeds, to make
them shine. There was litter on the path, fresh each day. Sometimes she found bits of
newspaper, printed in a language foreign to her. They had blown all the way round the oneil, from
the forested places where the important people were born. She read the paper scraps aloud.
Foreign words stuttered out her dry mouth.

Then she swept the yard. It was hot here so she unbuttoned her blouse. The hazy sun caught
her breasts. Sometimes wolfboys came and watched her. They often approached her, and she
shooed them out with her broom.

There was litter in the yard, too. Tin cans clattered when she hit them with her broom. They
made dry, hot sounds. Sometimes she had to kick them to loosen them from the dirt, or even
pluck them out by the root. When she touched them they scalded her fingers.

Then there was Jessie. He told her where in the Census building needed the cleaning most.
One day he led her into a room which was very clean, and very clean people stood about the
room, and she wondered what she was doing here, and turned to get back to her work, but they
crowded around her and made reassuring noises and Jessie gave her a stick of gum which
tasted odd.

She changed, year by year. She grew tired of cleaning, so the Census gave her better things to
do. She was very happy in the Census, very proud to have been given a drug which, it was said,
was the latest in a line of treatments to restore people' souls. When Jessie told her that the
Census had decided to make her a Cube, so that they might monitor her progress over six
lifetimes, she smiled for the second time in her life -- very quickly, as if the muscles that should
have made a smile were wasted.

Only in her second lifetime did Jessie tell her about the Recidivists, and by then it was clear that
Alia, though she was brighter now, did not and would not ever develop a soul. the Census, who
had had to find other things to demonstrate to irate creditor governments, were experimenting
with beastmen again; they forgot about her.

Jessie.

She shivers. The house feels cramped. The pulsing softness of its walls no longer comforts
her. She realises that she is almost afraid of it.

Jessie had a soul.

She goes outside.

Jessie laughed. They killed him, killed him because whatever treatment they had given him had
worked, killed him because they were machines and he was human and they were afraid, of
humans, of change, of life itself.

Here, beyond the rubbish-filled yard, with tier upon tier of sleeping houses ranged about her, she
could be anywhere and anywhen. She could be anyone -- anything.