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

"Human revenants. You honestly don't want to know," she said. It was so tiring, being on edge like this: even the wild boys didn't seem threatening enough to justify keeping her defenses on edge. "We just can't compete." A soft rain was falling outside, pattering through the hole in the wall.
"And who are you?" probed the boy, looking for completeness.
"Can't you guess?" she complained. "You've had it easy with your smug mind-games and your revolution in one habitat! Don't you see?" The wind ghosted through the house like the soul of history, ruffling her hair. "We tried to carry the revolution through outside the closed habitat, we fought for a century ..." She stared into reflective distances, eyes like dark mirrors, resembling her mind.
" ... but we lost."

The Hunter was wandering, adrift in an ocean of despair, when she came across Valentin Zero. Her video surfaces were locked into the sonic images of a fruit bat in free fall; when she saw something unusual she tensed instinctively. Could it be a boyish thing, here in the axial zone? A surge of conditioned reflexes drowned her nervous system in adrenalin and hatred; but as the bat approached the object it resolved into three components, all too small. Her skulls couldn't find a meaning for it. Drifting into a close approach, she noted three cylinders and a bushy twirl of vegetation. Modified axons in the bat's ears recognized vague high-frequency emissions, the fingerprint of molecular-scale processors; it had to be intelligent.
"Hello unidentified structure," she squeaked through the ultrasonic larynx of the bat. "Talk to me."
The structure began to rotate, sluggishly; the bat picked up another object, the vibrating flight surfaces of an insect. An eye swam into view, shielded by a triangular leaf. The bat screamed; something was scanning down its nervous system, trying to locate the hunter's interface.
"Who are you?" said the cluster of grey cylinders, words burning silent tracks of silvery pain through the mind of the bat. "Visualize yourself." The Hunter framed an image and transmitted it, waited as the intruder scanned it.
"Nike," broadcast Valentin; "What are you doing here?"
Then there was silence, as high above the castle the Hunter remembered who she had been.


First published: Interzone 21, 1987
Copyright (C) Charles Stross, 1987, 1994, All Rights Reserved


Version History

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Ver 1.5 - 30/7/2003 - Anarchy Publications, HaVoK - This version was originally downloaded from the #bookz channel on undernet using mIRC. The final proof was done with Atlantis by Rising Sun Solutions.