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

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 them all. Nobody needs anything Ц the die-backs left a vast overcapacity. The city's a playground for the boys so nobody lives there anymore."
He shoveled in another handful of food without looking up. "You came at the wrong time."
Nike watched him silently for a while, fascinated. She wondered if she'd met him before, years ago; so many of her memories from the early days had been wiped to make room for new experiences that she couldn't be sure.
He finished eating and finally looked up. "Just what did you come here for, anway?" he asked with an elaborate shrug.
"To take over," she said. "We need this space. What's your interest?"
He grinned, face in a shadow cast by the sunduct in the roof. "I'm a neutral. I have no interest in conflict."
"So?" she asked.
"The question is what you can do for us," he added. "Who you are."
Her eyes flashed, reflecting the night with mirrored venom. "I'm the forerunner. My people are coming and they need a vacant biosphere. Don't stand in our way!"
"I'm not," he remonstrated mildly; "I just want to know who you are. I'm not opposing you! But the boys probably will. And the Shogun might."
"Yes," she said. "But just what are these boys? And who is the Shogun?"
He raised an eyebrow. "That," he replied, "is something I expected you to know already."

The Hunter stared at the screen until the pain in her eyes forced her to blink furiously, tears trickling down her cheeks. It was hard to bear, this sense of her humanity being reduced to a cypher by isolation. The feeling that she'd been locked in her role for too long while the boys played their blood-games in the forest. Sometimes she sent out for a warm skull to scan for the wet sensations of dying; she couldn't remember her name but she felt that if she concentrated on it for long enough it would return... she was close to an overload with time. It had been too many years since she had been merely human. Damn, damn, she whispered to herself in a monotonous litany; why do I keep forgetting what it was like? There was no answer; there never was.
All she knew was that she couldn't get a grip on her emotions. There'd been a time, not so long ago in historical terms, when she had possessed a blindingly important purpose for which she had sacrificed her freedom to be anyone but herself. The purpose might have been connected with the Shogun or the boys; it had faded into the cobwebs of neurones that died and were replaced by the longevity programs. To those who knew the signs she was as old as the artificial hills. She knew that it had meant everything to her once: but now it was merely the voice from behind her throne, and the boys.

Three short grey cylinders the size of mice drifted in free fall, jostling in the thin breeze along the axis of the world. One of them was capped at each end by a blue, very human eye. Another sprouted two surreal ears, perfect fleshy miniatures that merged seamlessly with the cylinder. The third had no discernable sense organs, but from a crack in its flank grew an almost perfect stem of convolvulus. The bindweed curled and twisted, loosely holding the other two cylinders in its green coils. A wasp coasted nearby, red-banded and bearing stenciled cyrillic insignia on its wings; five kilometers below, the cotton-wool swathes of cloud veiled the floor of the world. Valentin Zero had smuggled his cortex modules into the shogunate as seeds disguised in Nike's gut. Reaching the free-fall zone via the sewage system, the modules had matured and grown rapidly by preying on wind-born organisms; the wasp was one of many infiltrators sweeping the world for news.
As darkness fell, the twittering code-pulses from the videomice quietened down; Valentin tuned in on the steady, low-powered grumble of the neuroplants, the tok-tokking of a factory talking to its robots, the muffled crackling of poorly-shielded bionics hooked into the soil-support system. The microwave traffic was richer and more compressed than sonic communication, echoing back and forth along the eighty-kilometer cylinder. But Valentin was listening for a single delicate pulse-train; the side-band transmission from Nike's eyeballs.
This situation interested him, inasmuch as anything could hold his attention these days; the ins and outs of betrayal, of wheels within wheels and subordinates who were superiors. Valentin Zero was an expert system wired for espionage, and his current mission was to monitor Nike. She was so old as to be almost obsolete: old enough to have been here before. His sensorium ghosted through winds of data Ц the life-blood of even the most seriously injured orbital republic Ц until he finally locked onto a signal that looked right. It was faint, but the sophisticated coding matched his key; he locked on and submerged in the transmission, saw what Nike was seeing.
The wall of the house caved in soundlessly, blood spurting from severed arteries buried in the walls, followed by a soundless spasm as the floor shuddered and died. A release of sphincters flooded the food trough. A boy stepped through a great ragged rent in front of her; his left arm was coated to the elbow with a smooth sheen of gore, the chainsaw semi-retracted and murderous. His bronze exoskeleton exposed white skin and atrophied genitals, a wildly ecstatic smile of welcome beneath a cowlick of brown hair. The running lights on his spinal carapace were blinking green and violet pips, as membranes slid down across Nike's eyes and a targeting display flashed a red crosshair surrounded by flickering digits across his face.
"Hello," he said, and tittered. Ben sat where he was, very still, eyes narrowed; Nike felt her perception compress into a point on the boy's forehead, a point that could be made to explode.
"Hello," she replied. The boy frowned, as if disappointed.
"You're not scared," he complained, "and you're not dead. What are you?" He pouted with a transsexual sullenness that struck her as grotesquely old-fashioned.
"I'm a visitor," she replied. "What are you?"
"I'm a Boy," he said, smiling suddenly; "I've come Ц "
"He's come to negotiate their surrender," said Ben. The boy flared again, mercurially angry.
"You shut up, old man! That's for me to tell. It's not true, anyway."
Ben shut up, his face blank. Nike felt as if solid ground was dissolving beneath her feet. She'd pegged Ben as a non-participant, but this boy seemed to know something that she didn't.
"What have you got to tell me?" she asked, itching with unease.
"Merely to enquire after your health and your diplomatic patronage," said the boy, sniffing disdainfully. With a distinct lack of theatrical presence he sniffed and scratched under one armpit. "But the old man of the monolith's got to you already, I see!"
"The monolith?" she asked, tracking Ben with her peripheral vision. He sat as still as a rock.
"The castle ... the claw of the Shogun. We've been trying to get him to shut down the Hunter for decades, haven't we?" The boy glanced at Ben pointedly; Ben rocked slowly back and forth. The boy grimaced. "Observe the Shogun: theoretical ruler of the world, patron of the ongoing revolution, supreme systems authority of the dreamtime, etcetera. We've been trying to get him to do his job since he ran away fifty years ago."
"Why?" she asked, wondering to whom she should address the question.
"Because I'm not ready to let the boys do what they were designed to do," said Ben, not looking at her: "I'm not prepared to forcibly digitise the entire human biomass of the System to suit an ideological goal. When we designed the boys Ц"
"Ц Who were 'we'?" she butted in, gripped by a sense of deja vu.
He stared at her and yawned. "You just want to confirm this, don't you?" he said. "We were the Posthuman Front, the society for synthetic intelligence. The Islamic Corporate Shogunate was an experimental deployment for the revolution; fanatical cyborgs. Some of them were the wild boys and some of them were less obvious, like the hunters. They knew that when they died they'd be preserved in the dreamtime; their job was to forcibly integrate all reactionary elements. Very successful, I might add: most of the neuroplants in this world are part of the mind-support system. But it didn't work out too well." Ben paused, head bowed; the boy looked at him accusingly.
"The ecosystem was damaged during the revolution; it began to shut down," said the boy. "We stayed on in hope of finding transport to another world where we could integrate, but evidently there was a quarantine pact; all the exfiltrators lost contact. And then Ben reprogrammed that blasted Hunter Ц the only surviving one, we exported all the other clones Ц on our collective ass to keep us from getting enough slack ..." He shook his alloy-framed head. "Unless those early cadres succeeded, the revolution was an abortion. Any idea how many humans want what's on offer?" He snorted, disgustedly.
Nike looked at him enigmatically. "Yes," she said; "I have. I've seen it at first hand."
"Why are you here?" asked the boy. Nike shrugged.
"My people aren't very popular out there," she said. "We need some where to go; the Deconstructivists are pushing in everywhere, and we've lost ground so heavily that unless we find a closed habitat we'll be forced to condense in order to prevent mass defections."
"Deconstructivists?" said Ben. "What are they?"