"Stross, Charles - Yellow Snow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)
Charles Stross
Sometimes you have to make speed, not haste. I made twenty kilos and moved it fast. Good old dex is an easy synthesis but the polizei had all the organochemical suppliers bugged; when a speed stash hit the street without any blat they'd be through the audit trail fast. They'd take a cut Ц my lungs, heart and ribosomes. Only idiots push psychoactives in Paraguay: only idiots or the truly desperate. I burned out via Brazilia and crashed into Ant City. Jet-lagged all the way across Australia, I considered my futures; it was time to move on to something bigger.
My first impression of Ant City was of being roasted, slowly. The blistering humidity was outflow from the huge heat exchangers run by the city reactors. Palm trees in the airport lounge, a rude, chattering spidermonkey loose among the branches. No power, no Ants, a simple equation: I was in Antarctica now, and wondering what the hell to do about it. It was another world out there: I could feel a grating closeness between my shoulder blades, the crush of humanity around me.
Alleyways of light lured me through the customs interface, briefing me on local lores. Digital fingers rifled my flesh with radiation but I was clean and mean Ц nobody with any sense takes bugs into the ant farm. It's a ticket to re-direction, and I need my inputs remoulding like I need a concience. My scams are all cortex-ridden, locked in by mnemonics until I'm ready to bring them out like a card sharp. Sleight of memory. The security goon smiled sweetly, her eyes asking me if I was really alive, and waved me past the desk.
The shuttleport is half a klick above Ant City proper; I took the lift down. It was a medium sized lift, with only a medium-sized shopping mall. Shop, shop, expend, expend. A glaring incitement to Ц
I shut my eyes and as I was trying to pin down a plan this kid tried to lift the chips from out of my skull. Which was his bad luck: I didn't have any. I opened my eyes and shifted my grip on his wrists so he had to face me.
"Nice way to greet tourists," I said. He squirmed fearfully, muscles like metallic glass beneath his warm brown skin. "You know what I should do with you?" He looked as if he didn't, and wasn't interested in finding out either. He'd forgotten to feed the cat or something else important. I looked at the inside of his wrist; the node was there.
"You eat shit," he said. I glared back at him.
"Yeah, every day just like you. I should bust your fingers. You want to tell me why not?"
"No," said the kid, looking like trouble warmed over the next morning; "you break my fingers then my friend come and break yours." He managed to ignore me and look contemptuous concurrently. He couldn't have been topside of twelve years without maturity-mods. Neomacho, cued-up by background video. For the first time I looked at his tribals. He wore a one piece suit, ice camouflage militia-surplus. His wrist node was well-worn. Classic case of heroin from six years, riding the horse out from under the shadow of future shock; it's the kids who suffer most, these days.
"That would be kind of a bad idea," I said, "for your friend. I got no chips. My wallet's armed; tell your sister to put it back before she gets gluey fingers. You want me to give you some money?"
"You what?" said the kid. I felt butterfly fingers slip something that buzzed into my pocket; it stopped buzzing when it sniffed me again. I'm touchy about where my wallet goes without me.
"I repeat myself," I said; "you want to earn some money?" I leaned forward. More suspicion.
"You want I should go to bed with you?"
"No. I want some names, nothing else. Like who shifts your stuff."
His face cleared, magically. "You want some?" he asked, happily. "I sell you Ц "
"No," I said, "I just want a name."
"Oh." He looked disappointed. Then, "are you polizei?"
I weighed my chances. "Would you believe if I said no?"
"No." His eyes narrowed.
"Then get lost." I gave him a push and he went. His sister had vanished into an open shopfront selling gauzy somethings under spotlights; for the moment at least they were zero factors in my equation. I stood alone for a while, wondering what I looked like to the local talent and whether I needed a new line; some nagging doubt kept telling me that I was getting too old for this game. Trying to quell my worry I crossed to the observation deck and looked out.
The mall was descending towards a park with a lake around it, and a landscaped garden at one end of the lake. Ant City floated like a submarine in an inclusion of melt-water beneath the ice cap. Kept from freezing by the tokamaks, the water acted as a buffer against icequakes; also as central heating. The lift was just now dropping out of the roof of the city, and the view was dizzying; the city curved with the horizon. Suddenly I had a sense of imminence, of seeing a new frontier opening up before me even though the underground was actually closing in for real, like the dizzying megatonnes of ice overhead: it was shaping up to be a classic revelation. The kind of sensation you get when a new idea is coming up hot and hard. I took stock of my situation Ц
So consider me: male, self-contained, intelligent, age twenty-seven. The product of an expensive corporate shockwave education, designed to surf over new developments on the cutting edge of R&D. I'd freebased from my corporate owners: only time and independence had cost me my flexibility. I had bank accounts in Liechtenstein and Forties Field, no commitments, but I was unable to access the big company AI's, my knowledge was going rusty in the face of informational explosion; I was staring career burnout in the face at thirty. I had pushed every synthetic narcotic I could make, but only in small-to-medium scale production: I had always managed to skip out before the blowback. Hit and run. I didn't use them myself, but supplied a demand; I made people happy for a living. What could be better than that? I liked to consider myself to be a moral anarchist, Kropotkins' heir. Only where was I going to go next?
I found a phone and used it to find a list of rented accomodation; I chose a flat, furnished, four rooms, monthly payments, good view of the park. If I hadn't been speeding a week ago it would have cost an arm and a leg, or at least a kidney. Now all I had to do was make the right contact; and that, for someone of my background, was easy.
We met in a cafe on the edge of a drained swimming pool, where the penguins jostled excitedly for scraps from the tables. She looked nervous, which was to be expected. I was, too. I didn't even know how much she wanted for the job! Just that she was as desperate as I was.
"What you're looking for ... " she said; "dangerous, you know? The temporal annealing processes aren't really mapped out very well, and the moles are kinda touchy about nosing it about. I mean, this is military surplus, right?" She dragged on the hookah nervously, watching the surveillance cameras for blind-spots. Concentrating on the long-lost lover bullshit for the digital polizei, I smiled tenderly before I replied.
"Look," I said, "this is SDI spin-off material, right? After the third world war came out biological all the Pentagon defence contracts lapsed, leaving you with a heap of junk and no budget, right? So why not use it to make some quick cash? Face it, you're damn near starving. Now I Ц " I leaned back in my chair Ц "I'm a potentia customer. With currency. The PERV was designed to let them know when to zap missiles before they torched off, and the Interactive Reality Transformer was built to open a hole in spacetime. So why can't you turn them into a time machine for me? I'm willing to pay! And I mean to say, if the old Unistat government trusted that rig with their lives, what can go wrong with it now?"
She coughed. "Lots," she said drily. "Just look what happened to them. You're forgetting that this stuff was never used ... only tested in simulation. Nobody ever did get round to firing smart rocks through a time window, did that escape your attention? This is highly, uh, dangerous."
I sighed. "Look," I said, "for the final time, that's your speciality. Not mine! I mean, I like the idea of supporting higher education, I really do, but I can't afford to throw money away without any come-back on the investment, right? But if you and your university department do this for me, I'll see about ... uh, endowing a Chair in perpetuity, maybe?"
"The College authorities might be doubtful about naming a chair after a semilegal drug dealer," she said dubiously. It was the first sign of her fall from grace; so she was desperate! I pushed on.
"Yeah," I said, "but you can call it whatever you want. I paid for your flight here, didn't I? When was the last time your government gave you any money for anything? Look, just do this for me and I'll make an endowment you won't forget."
"Um, right," she said, almost smacking her lips. Then she made her decision; the right one. "Okay. Fly up to Oxford in the first week of next month. I'll have one of our post-docs meet you in; we should be ready to test by then." A faint cloud crossed her face. "You've no idea how bad things have got up there," she added softly; "You were a good student, on that exchange program. Try not to get shot before we're ready, right?"
"Sure professor," I said, waving for the waiter. "That's, like, one of my life's ambitions."
She unwound a bit. "What's the other?"
I grinned widely. "To fuck Ronald Reagan."
While I was waiting for the call from the Hawking Laboratory I crashed out in front of the video, reading graphic novels and scanning reruns of twentieth century docudramas. The condenser burbled in the makeshift fume cupboard I'd built in the bathroom and the gene-spinners clicked intermittently as I soaked up Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Leonid Brezhnev. Creatures of another era, when the universe was just about beginning to fill up and society was teetering on the edge of a baroque tomorrow; fascinating cut-outs in a past that was truly another country. Twenty years earlier still everything was so naive, so pre-technological; but the timezone I'd picked was already on the brink of today, unsophisticated bug-ridden systems powering up for the remorseless march into a post-modernist present. People were waking up to changes, beginning to notice the end of industrialism. Yeah, I figured I could hack it; gather protective coloration, not look too out of place, but be so far ahead of the pack that I could hit them with a dose of double-barrelled futurism and make my getaway clean-heeled and rich enough to retire ...
"Just say NO," I mimicked, and threw an empty beer can at the screen. Good jokes are made of this, I thought. Then the phone coughed.
"Yeah?" I asked.
"It's for you," it said, extending the handset. I took it and listened. "Twenty mil? That's steep ... okay, yeah, so it's never been done before ... how much? Oh, right. I'll figure a way ... day after tomorrow? Fine. See ya." The phone grabbed its handset back and wiped it furiously. I tried to stare it down, but it didn't seem to notice. In my experience when domestic appliances get uppity the only answer is to shoot them; but I didn't have a gun on me so I leaned back and thought irritably about what the good professor's news instead.
The weight restriction on the time jump was going to be tight. It worked out at ten kilograms, plus my good self. That's not much, is it? Clothing, a portable kit, some raw materials Ц not much. Compute-power no problem; you can only cram so many mainframes into a false tooth, but back where I was going even one of them was going to give me an unfair edge. The real problem was going to be currency for investment. I frowned. Credit? Did they have credit in those days? Or did they have to carry metal coins around? What could I use instead?
Ah. Good idea. Why not do it right now? I sat up and grinned wildly, then staggered through to the bathroom. My gene-machine was sitting on the floor, humming to itself. I bent down and plugged myself in, figuring out the ideal stash. Something they'd never check for; something better than money, a dirt cheap commodity to vector on the market. Like the goose that laid the golden eggs, I was going to make a one-man heroin fortune in the eighties! I was going to be so successful the market price was going to bomb! Yes, I'd seen the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The pot of yellow snow ...
Yellow snow is a handle for a kind of cheap dealer shit; nobody falls for it these days. All it takes is a gene-machine and the nerve to use it on yourself. You engineer a retrovirus that makes a minor alteration to your enkephalin receptor's tertiary structure, thus changing it's substrate affinity; then you engineer another that adds a small peptide tag to the stuff your own receptors get off on, so that they match. Customise your pain/pleasure complex, right? That leaves you free to use another virus, one that makes some of your peripheral tissue Ц pancreas, say Ц go into endorphin overdrive, pumping out the real McCoy in such volume that you literally piss heroin analogs away whenever you go to the toilet. Now Ц this is the cool bit Ц you add some acetic acid to neutralise all that ammonia and urea, then you partition it out in organic solvents and dissolve it in a sugar solution and re-crystalise. You get natural heroin in your kitchen sink! Indistinguishable from gold triangle authentic, excpt that it's better. Only trouble is, there's a certain stigma attached to its source, hence the handle yellow snow; nobody wants to be pissed on by their dealer, hey? Anyway, these days customs computers don't look out for hidden stashes; they're on the scan for designer genes. So any time after the naughty 'nineties yellow snow would be a non-starter. But where/when I was going ...
"Just say no," I mimicked. Then I slurped another beer can. "I'm gonna piss on you all, junkies!" Good joke for an anarchist businessman, teetering on the edge of burnout, to ride the elevator back to where it all began. I wondered why nobody had done this before; it seemed so cool!
Maybe I was going to find out.
I hitched a Zeppelin ride for Ancient Britannia to give me time to assemble my time-travel survival kit; also time to take it slow and easy and get my head screwed on in preparation for the jump. I locked myself in my first-class stateroom and ignored the long, stately cruise across icy wastes and the ocean gulf to the Cape of Good Hope. The passengers were socialising frenetically, holding balls and orgies in the gas-cell auditoria; I didn't need it right then. I don't like have people rammed down my throat, en masse: I need to retreat into my personal space, to maintain a distance between myself and the burning wilderness of raw nerve endings that constitutes a global culture for ten billion naked apes.
As we crossed the Azanian coast I went on a shopping spree. The latest databases from Grolier; a repo'd personal dialysis machine from Squibb; a very compact mainframe from Bull-Siemens. Everything to be collected when I got where I was going. In a mail-order feeding-frenzy I ordered anything I thought I could use that weighed less than fifty grams; then I crashed out for a relaxed sybaritic binge, dragging on designer silks for a bar-crawl around the kilometer-long airship. There was a lot of entertainment to be had, watching the desperate writhings of the jet-stream set on their slow intercontinental cruises through the new millennium; being rich beyond belief they travelled as slowly as possible, in order to flaunt their leisure time. As a handsome dowager told me on her way through my bed and my affections: "But dear, only the poor have to hurry to keep up! Speed is no substitute for real life." No, but it sure could enhance my credit status ...
A week to cover fourteen thousand kilometres and we were on final approach into one of the main British airports. One which still had a runway. I shook my head, looking down through the transparent deck. I was going to get something unique out of that? Even the ruins looked dingy.
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