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

And dead.

I saw it all in a flash.

"Oh, for God's sake, Courtney!" I said, disgusted. "I can't believe you. That you'd actually… That
thing's just an obedient body. There's nothing there—no passion, no connection, just…
physical presence."

Courtney made a kind of chewing motion through her smile, weighing the implications of what she was
about to say. Nastiness won.

"We have equity now," she said.

I lost it then. I stepped forward, raising a hand, and I swear to God I intended to bounce the bitch's head
off the back wall. But she didn't flinch—she didn't even look afraid. She merely moved aside,
saying, "In the body, Bruno. He has to look good in a business suit."

A dead fist smashed into my ribs so hard I thought for an instant my heart had stopped. Then Bruno
punched me in my stomach. I doubled over, gasping. Two, three, four more blows. I was on the ground
now, rolling over, helpless and weeping with rage.

"That's enough, baby. Now put out the trash."

Bruno dumped me in the hallway.

I glared up at Courtney through my tears. She was not at all beautiful now. Not in the least. You're
getting older, I wanted to tell her. But instead I heard my voice, angry and astonished, saying,
"You… you goddamn, fucking necrophile!"

"Cultivate a taste for it," Courtney said. Oh, she was purring! I doubted she'd ever find life quite this good
again. "Half a million Brunos are about to come on the market. You're going to find it a lot more difficult
to pick up living women in not so very long."

I sent away the dead whore. Then I took a long shower that didn't really make me feel any better.
Naked, I walked into my unlit suite and opened the curtains. For a long time I stared out over the glory
and darkness that was Manhattan.

I was afraid, more afraid than I'd ever been in my life.

The slums below me stretched to infinity. They were a vast necropolis, a never-ending city of the dead. I
thought of the millions out there who were never going to hold down a job again. I thought of how they
must hate me—me and my kind— and how helpless they were before us. And yet. There
were so many of them and so few of us. If they were to all rise up at once, they'd be like a tsunami,
irresistible. And if there was so much as a spark of life left in them, then that was exactly what they would
do.

That was one possibility. There was one other, and that was that nothing would happen. Nothing at all.

God help me, but I didn't know which one scared me more.