"Michael Swanwick - Radiant Doors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

I took the bippy out from my purse. It felt cool and smooth in my hand, like
melting ice. No, warm. It felt both warm and cool. I ran my hand over and over it,
for the comfort of the thing.

After a minute, I got up, zipped shut the flap to my office, and secured it with a
twist tie. Then I went back to my desk, sat down, and unbuttoned my blouse. I
rubbed the bippy all over my body: up my neck, and over my breasts and around
and around on my belly. I kicked off my shoes and clumsily shucked off my
pantyhose. Down along the outside of my calves it went, and up the insides of my
thighs. Between my legs. It made me feel filthy. It made me feel a little less like
killing myself.

How it happened was, I got lost. How I got lost was, I went into the camp after
dark.

Nobody goes into the camp after dark, unless they have to. Not even the Indian

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Michael%20Swanwick%20-%20Radiant%20Doors.htm (12 of 21) [12/30/2004 8:07:58 PM]
 Radiant Doors by Michael Swanwick This story first appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1998


troops. That's when the refugees hold their entertainments. They had no
compassion for each other, you seeтАУthat was our dirty little secret. I saw a toddler
fall into a campfire once. There were vics all around, but if it hadn't been for me,
the child would have died. I snatched it from the flames before it got too badly
hurt, but nobody else made a move to help it. They just stood there looking. And
laughing.

"In Dachau, when they opened the gas chambers, they'd find a pyramid of human
bodies by the door," Shriver told me once. "As the gas started to work, the Jews
panicked and climbed over each other, in a futile attempt to escape. That was
deliberate. It was designed into the system. The Nazis didn't just want them
deadтАУthey wanted to be able to feel morally superior to their victims afterward."

So I shouldn't have been there. But I was unlatching the door to my trailer when it
suddenly came to me that my purse felt wrong. Light. And I realized that I'd left
the bippy in the top drawer of my office desk. I hadn't even locked it.

My stomach twisted at the thought of somebody else finding the thing. In a panic,
I drove back to the camp. It was a twenty-minute drive from the trailer park and
by the time I got there, I wasn't thinking straight. The civ/noncom parking lot was
a good quarter-way around the camp from the Tentagon. I thought it would be a
simple thing to cut through. So, flashing my DOD/Future History Division ID at
the guard as I went through the gate, I did.

Which was how I came to be lost.

There are neighborhoods in the camp. People have a natural tendency to sort
themselves out by the nature of their suffering. The twitchers, who were victims