"Stross, Charles - Yellow Snow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

The arrival zone was dirty yellow; beggars displayed their wounds beside a kitchen selling curry from the pot. They had a scared-looking goat tethered nearby to show how fresh the meat was. I pulled on my shades and walked fast, kept walking until I came to a concourse. Somebody grabbed me; I looked round.
"Mister Agonistes?" I saw naked fear in his gaunt face. Polizei leaned on their guns outside, sniffing for the spoor-signs of money. I nodded. "I'm from the research centre; I was to take you to the laboratory ... "
"That's good," I said. "Where's our chopper?"
"Our what? Oh ... I'm sorry. We couldn't possibly afford one," he said lamely. Gaunt beneath threadbare tweed clothing: The public rice ration had gone downhill, I noted. "We could get a rickshaw ... if you could pay ... "
I paid.
The lab was a decrepit concrete cube, unpainted for decades, glass-faced windows nailed over with boards and a makeshift wind-turbine bolted to the roof. Only the satellite downlinks were clean, desperately polished to the shimmery finish of metal that was about to wear through. He led me inside, up a staircase in which trash had drifted deep. "We can only run the lift for two hours a day," he apologized; "the turbine is for the big stuff." He glanced over his shoulder furtively, as if trying to guess how much meat there was on my bones; I shivered. Maybe I'd grown too fat on the airship, and too slow.
"Here we are," he said, pushing open a fire door at the top of the stairs. "Here's where we stored the IRT modules. The PERV is hooked into our system next door; the stuff you ordered ... it's all here."
"Where's Professor Illich?" I asked.
He shrugged uncomfortably. "She'll be here soon," he said. "I'd better go now ... "
He retreated through another door and I took stock. Everything I'd ordered, plus a cheap nylon rucksack of dubious vintage. I searched through it, assembling and ordering, then opened my wallet. Three small glass vials lined up like so many menacing soldiers; diseases of the imagination. I hoped I'd debugged them properly. I sat down on the dusty floor beneath a hulking piece of machinery that resembled a half-melted fusion reactor and contemplated them. My future: the past. I sat for a long time before I pulled out my works and fired them up.
Professor Illich arrived half an hour later; she looked just the same as she had in Ant city, except that now the hungry eagerness underlying her veneer of professionalism was nakedly obvious. I imagined her rotting in these dank, woodwormed buildings for decades, chances of the Nobel prize slipping through fingers without the financial grasp to obtain that vital extra funding ... I kicked aside the empty vials. They clattered off the concrete as I stood up.
"Does it work?" I asked.
She smiled tensely, and rested one hand on the smooth ceramic side of the malnourished reactor. "It works," she said. "One Probabilistic Eigenstate Reorganisation Viewer, in full working order." She looked over her shoulder; "Steve ... go tell Anwar to power up the Cray, there's a good boy." She turned back to me. "The account," she said.
"Here. You tested it?" I kept my fingers on the folio as she paused.
"A cat. We sent it back six months then retrieved it. Alive."
"How long was the delay?" I asked.
She shrugged. "Six milliseconds."
"Six milliseconds!" Incredulous, I nearly grabbed the megadollar envelope back from her. She nearly exploded.
"Look, mister Agonistes, we've gone to all this trouble for you ..! Don't you know anything about temporal annealing? There are limits to how far we can test it. Spacetime is a continuum, an interwoven fabric of superstrings; you can unravel it for a moment and see through to a new pattern ... then it re-weaves itself, anneals into a new structural arangement with minimal potential energy. The wave-function always collapses Ц you ever heard of Schroedinger's cat?"
"Yeah!" I said. "But six milliseconds?"
"You wanted a trip into the past. We wanted to prove that you could make it alive, not prove that you could make it and come back as well. That's what you asked for, right? We had to go on half-rations for a week to afford the power for the one trial! There was no second chance. As it is we know you'll make it alive, but there's no guarantee that the past you come out in is our past Ц it might be another configuration, another local minimum in the energy diagram. We'll try to bring you back ... " I held up a hand wearily.
"Okay." I turned and looked up at the IRT module, squatting on concrete blocks streaked with rust like some prehistoric lunar module with cancer. I was loaded; I felt light-headed, almost feverish, as the retroviruses went to work in my brain and pancreas. "I'll take it," I said. "Try to bring me back one year downstream and I'll double your money. After the event. You know why I'm trying to make this trip?"
She nodded mutely, trying to contain herself. What I'd just said Ц twenty million pounds more would keep her and her department running for ten years. Ethics could take a back seat for that kind of hope. I almost felt sorry for her for a minute.
"Okay," I said, "let's do it. Where do I go?"
She looked at me critically. "Here, in this circle." White spot on concrete, right underneath something that bore an unpleasant resemblance to the exhaust nozzle of a big rocket motor. "Remember ... when the eigenstate collapses, there are no guarantees. You might wind up in our past ... then again, if there's a local entropic minimum you might find yourself in a universe which has changed subtly. Less entropy; more information. That's the curve, you see, randomness versus order. We'll dragnet for you a year down the time stream from your target Ц April first, eighty four, wasn't it? Ц as long as you keep holding onto this tag Ц " she passed a gadget to me that looked a bit like a quaint digital watch " Ц and hope for the best. Jump in thirty seconds..."
With that she retreated rapidly, leaving me standing in a dusty circle with a small pack on my back and a feeling that maybe I'd been tricked, when there was a low growling noise and the naked light bulb dimmed, flickered and went out. Violet shadows seemed to flicker at the edges of my vision, dancing across the shadowy form of the IRT: then PERV counted down to the launch window, and in a sudden burst of shocking blue flashed out Ц
Darkness. Feeling giddy, I staggered, and kicked something that fell over with a terrifyingly loud clatter. Where was I? Fumbling in semi-panic I felt cold walls beneath my fingertips, then the inside of a door Ц
Light. Leaving the broom-cupboard I stumbled downstairs. The door: fresh green paint glared at me beneath recessed fluorescent lighting. AN ALARM WILL SOUND ... I pushed through. Outside, the grass was neatly mown and the concrete apron was full of archaic-looking vehicles with squared-off edges and too much metal. Elation seized me; I'd made it! I headed for the street and reached a bus shelter Ц unvandalized Ц where I put my pack down. Fumbling, I pulled on my datashades and eyeballed a glittering cursor into the middle of my visual field. There were few people about, and nobody seemed to be staring at me; I looked round, correlating visual parameters. Everything seemed to be in order, there were no visible anachronisms; it felt as if time had healed all wounds, as if the clock had wound back to deposit me gently in the tail-end of the last century when civilisation was a function of humanity rather than machines. I felt safe in my uniform of jeans and sweat-shirt and back-pack: camouflage for the urban fox. Safe and sly and hungry, ready to take on the forces of this sleepy little city ... I began to walk, a spring in my step.
Street corner shops bustled with grey people in archaic clothing: mass production fashion victims filled the mall like so many mannequins of times gone by. Remember how everyone used to look the same? Vehicle traffic was thicker here/then, as I discovered when I crossed the road. Polizei ... I tensed, then realised that there were no guns and I could actually see their eyes. There were no beggars, either. The skin on the back of my neck crawled. Without beggars, how do you know how rich you are? My shades were slowly caking over with graphics as their sensors correlated textual overspill, scanning ads for familiar campaigns. I hadn't expected it to be quite like this, quite so disorientating. Not only did everyone wear more or less the same stereotyped costumes, they also seemed to be on an economic par with one another; as if poverty didn't exist at all here.
I cancelled my video program and took my glasses off. People seemed to focus around me, avoiding contact, eyes downcast. I felt sweaty, in the first bout of a low grade fever as my immune system targeted surplus viral vectors. Disseminating the news, data for the public ... how did they do it? Oh, archaic paper form. Remember ... I dug into one pocket for my precious supply of antique coinage. It was time to buy a newssheet.
The shop was wired, but the systems were so primitive as to be untouchable; no EPOS magic touch here, no files to tamper with for a bonus redirection of products. Anyway, I wasn't a black disc merchant to begin with; what was I thinking of? I looked at the racks and selected a fat-looking wedge of paper, then paid for it. The assistant Ц human Ц looked at me curiously, but was too busy with other customers to bother me; I nodded distractedly and strolled outside into the sunlight and shoppers.
Putting my datashades on I began to read the headlines, leaving my machines to deduce the social context from the references. Argentina was protesting to the UN about something called the Malvinas; there was widespread concern over a disaster at some place near Kiev; inflation was coming down. The computer pondered for a bit then reported a classic match. This was the past, okay. The incredible sense of elated freedom returned Ц it was true! I was going to make it! Burn-out reversed by the futurist acceleration; coming from a time when progress was incremented in microseconds, how could I fail in a time where product lifecycles came and went in years?
This was going to be good. Shark-hungry for profits I glanced round, looking for nightlife stakeouts to make my pitch from; haunt a small market and connect with the local yardie zone-boss. Show them the colour of profit; yellow snow. Flash out snowflakes of sugar-coated ecstasy on a captive market at ten eurodollars Ц pounds Ц a hit. Set up a still in a cheap rented flat; drink, eat, refine a hundred grammes of peptides a day. Then invest the profits for my triumphant return; computer-assisted share buying for artificially intelligent deals. I looked to the finance pages, seeking commodities in which I knew I could make a profit, and that's where I finally noticed the dissonance. Marihuana and opium futures were going down for the third successive year ...
It's been six months now.
I spent my first night, exhausted and hungry, on a park bench. Junkies shot up around me, cheap shit and clean needles available in a brown bag from the off-license stores; I watched, envying them their high, until one of them staggered over to me glowering and shaking a wobbly fist as he mouthed inaudible curses at me.
I began to notice signs beyond the financial pages. There's less crime, less moralizing; less fear. Less wealth, too. All the narcotics have been legal since 'thirty-three, when prohibition crashed in America and the rest of the world followed suit. Suicide is legal, too, and abortion, and anything you want to do to yourself in private. These people are so free! I should have guessed; what Professor Illich said about local minima in the curve of entropy, incomplete annealing of the wave-function, a time when things haven't gone quite so far downhill as in my own days' past ...
I remember pissing in the gutter; pissing yellow gold that sparkled in the cold sunlight. But what use is the Midas touch in a world of floating currencies? For a while my urine ran red, an unexpected side-effect of the infections; I had a terrible headache, and my teeth chattered continuously. But I'm better now. Much better. Got over my fear of brain damage; I'm not that incompetent.
Shit may be legal but there is a Problem with it. I heard the Prime Minister talking about it on the news yesterday. The Police want Something to be Done. I'll second that.
After a week, the Salvation Army took me in. They deal with a lot of junkies, try to rehabilitate them half-heartedly. I went overboard on the old 'seen the light' number, sang hallelujah! to their choir and mopped the floor after supper. They seem to like it.
Anyway, I have seen the light. Now I sleep in the hostel, clean floors in the evening, and parade the streets with a sandwich board by day. DRUGS ARE THE DEVIL'S TOOL, it says in big letters. I made it myself. I sleep on a narrow, hard bunk bed and dream up scams, but it's so very hard to figure out how to turn a megadollar profit when you're as broke as I am now; with no ID I can't even claim social security benefits. Kind of embarrassing. Meanwhile, I keep on with the only scam I know, pissing in the wind. You never know, I might get lucky. They might re-criminalize it tomorrow ...


First published: Interzone 37, 1990


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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.