"Michael Swanwick - The Very Pulse Of The Machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

THE VERY PULSE OF
THE MACHINE
Michael Swanwick
"The Very Pulse of the Machine" appeared in the February 1998 issue
of Asimov's, with an interior illustration by Alan Giana.

Click.
The radio came on.
"Hell."
Martha kept her eyes forward, concentrated on walking. Jupiter to one
shoulder, Daedalus's plume to the other. Nothing to it. Just trudge, drag,
trudge, drag. Piece of cake.
"Oh."
She chinned the radio off.
Click.
"Hell. Oh. Kiv. El. Sen."
"Shut up, shut up, shut up!" Martha gave the rope an angry jerk,
making the sledge carrying Burton's body jump and bounce on the sulfur
hardpan. "You're dead, Burton, I've checked, there's a hole in your
face-plate big enough to stick a fist through, and I really don't want to
crack up. I'm in kind of a tight spot here and I can't afford it, okay? So be
nice and just shut the fuck up."
"Not. Bur. Ton."
"Do it anyway."
She chinned the radio off again.
Jupiter loomed low on the western horizon, big and bright and
beautiful and, after two weeks on Io, easy to ignore. To her left, Daedalus
was spewing sulfur and sulfur dioxide in a fan two hundred kilometers
high. The plume caught the chill light from an unseen sun and her visor
rendered it a pale and lovely blue. Most spectacular view in the universe,
and she was in no mood to enjoy it.
 Click.
Before the voice could speak again, Martha said, "I am not going crazy,
you're just the voice of my subconscious, I don't have the time to waste
trying to figure out what unresolved psychological conflicts gave rise to all
this, and I am not going to listen to anything you have to say."
Silence.

The moonrover had flipped over at least five times before crashing
sideways against a boulder the size of the Sydney Opera House. Martha
Kivelsen, timid groundling that she was, was strapped into her seat so
tightly that when the universe stopped tumbling, she'd had a hard time
unlatching the restraints. Juliet Burton, tall and athletic, so sure of her
own luck and agility that she hadn't bothered, had been thrown into a
strut.
The vent-blizzard of sulfur dioxide snow was blinding, though. It was
only when Martha had finally crawled out from under its raging whiteness
that she was able to look at the suited body she'd dragged free of the
wreckage.
She immediately turned away.