"Michael Swanwick - The Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

admitted I wanted the position. And we all knew whose hand carried the whip.

"They can be catheterized," I said—"no toilet breaks."

For a long instant Koestler just stared at me blankly. Then he exploded with laughter. "By God, that's a
new one! You have a great future ahead of you, Donald. Welcome aboard."

He winked out.

We drove on in silence for a while, aimless, directionless. At last Courtney leaned forward and touched
the chauffeur's shoulder.

"Take me home," she said.

Riding through Manhattan I suffered from a waking hallucination that we were driving through a city of
corpses. Gray faces, listless motions. Everyone looked dead in the headlights and sodium-vapor
streetlamps. Passing by the Children's Museum I saw a mother with a stroller through the glass doors.
Two small children by her side. They all three stood motionless, gazing forward at nothing. We passed by
a stop-and-go where zombies stood out on the sidewalk drinking forties in paper bags. Through
upper-story windows I could see the sad rainbow trace of virtuals playing to empty eyes. There were
zombies in the park, zombies smoking blunts, zombies driving taxies, zombies sitting on stoops and
hanging out on street corners, all of them waiting for the years to pass and the flesh to fall from their
bones.

I felt like the last man alive.

Courtney was still wired and sweaty from the fight. The pheromones came off her in great waves as I
followed her down the hall to her apartment. She stank of lust. I found myself thinking of how she got just
before orgasm, so desperate, so desirable. It was different after she came, she would fall into a state of
calm assurance; the same sort of calm assurance she showed in her business life, the aplomb she sought
so wildly during the act itself.

And when that desperation left her, so would I. Because even I could recognize that it was her
desperation that drew me to her, that made me do the things she needed me to do. In all the years I'd
known her, we'd never once had breakfast together.

I wished there was some way I could deal her out of the equation. I wished that her desperation were a
liquid that I could drink down to the dregs. I wished I could drop her in a winepress and squeeze her
dry.

At her apartment, Courtney unlocked her door and in one complicated movement twisted through and
stood facing me from the inside. "Well," she said. "All in all, a productive evening. Good night, Donald."

"Good night? Aren't you going to invite me inside?"

"No."

"What do you mean, no?" She was beginning to piss me off. A blind man could've told she was in heat
from across the street. A chimpanzee could've talked his way into her pants. "What kind of idiot game
are you playing now?"