"Charles Stross - The Boys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

was not a punishment but an execution. The absolutism of age. They cannibalized one of
their own, she wondered; why? Have the boys become so jaded that they gamble with their
own lives? And, dawning slowly in her mind: I don't understand this any more.

The house was so well camouflaged that Nike almost stumbled into it before she
realized what it was. It slumbered among the trees, concealed by a dense thicket of ivy; its
owner waited for her patiently outside.
"You're the immigrant," he said; "I'm Ben."
"Nike." She watched him closely, noted dark skin but no cranial hair.
"Winged victory? Or a missile?" When he spoke he held his head on one side. "Never
mind. You'll be wanting somewhere to stay while you find out what it's like here. You'll be
wondering why I'm offering that. I'll tell you; we don't see many strangers."
"How many of you are there?" she asked.
He shrugged. "Maybe five hundred, maybe less. Nobody counts. There's the boys,
the servants of the Shogunate, a few civilians who keep quiet. And the neuroplants; about six
million posthumans." For a moment Ben looked like something else; infinitely weary, lines
engraved on his face like tribal scars concealing eyeball-tracked weapons systems. It
passed; Nike concentrated on the smell of his skin, the pheromones he exuded. They smelt
so perfectly natural that he might have been a prehistoric subsistence farmer or a test pilot.
There was a sense of archaic simplicity about him.
"Do you eat?" she asked.

The Hunter dug through her collection of spare skulls in search of an apropriate
memory, in response to a desperate urge to understand. She found one, long-jawed with the
baroque horns of an extinct fashion. The motions were instinctive by now; she plugged it into
her throne by a fat nerve trunk and felt the alien emotions expand her perceptions into
something that felt more complete. The skull had been poorly maintained, isolated in sensory
deprivation for the better part of a century; it's personality had ablated away to a core of
memories and a vague, gnawing loneliness.
She remembered being a he: experienced at first hand the sea of stars beyond the
window of a cramped cargo drifter between worlds, the waves of vapour churning at the
edges of the red spot as mining drones scooped up megatons of methane from the Jovian
atmosphere. That wasn't right; she carried on searching. Later she remembered arriving at
TransLunar Seven shortly before the revolution. Being caught up in the confusion and
arrested by the hezbollah, undergoing the terror of forcible decapitation. This was too recent;
she wanted somewhere in between. Tried to remember. What had it been like in Troy-Jupiter
two hundred years ago?
The agonies this brain had been squeezed through made her wince. It was easy for a
Hunter to fall into the fatal trap of thinking of her memories as something more than a very
cunning source of information, of trying to relate to the dead minds in the boneyard. She
hunted and eventually found what she was looking for, partially obscured by the pain of a
bizarre and self-destructive marriage.
A memory of what it was like before the revolution, before she had become a Hunter.

The house vomited pre-digested morsels into the feeding trough. As Nike and Ben
ate, she tried to assess the situation. It was worse than she'd expected; the place wasn't far
from dead. An unseen ruler who might not even exist, a dissident faction with unspeakable
habits, and a dying periphery of humans.
"They shut down half the farms a century ago," said Ben, "and most of the rest forty
years later. There wasn't enough demand on the manufacturing capacity to justify running