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

created you?"
"So many a million of ages have gone. To the making of man. Alfred,
Lord Tennyson."
"That wasn't me, then. I'm only twenty-seven. You're obviously thinking
of somebody else."
"It was. Mobile. Intelligent. Organic. Life. You are. Mobile. Intelligent.
Organic. Life."
Something moved in the distance. Martha looked up, astounded. A
horse. Pallid and ghostly white, it galloped soundlessly across the plains,
tail and mane flying.
She squeezed her eyes tight and shook her head. When she opened her
eyes again, the horse was gone. A hallucination. Like the voice of
Burton/Io. She'd been thinking of ordering up another refresher of the
meth, but now it seemed best to put it off as long as possible. This was
sad, though. Inflating Burton's memories until they were as large as Io.
Freud would have a few things to say about that. He'd say she was
magnifying her friend to a godlike status in order to justify the fact that
she'd never been able to compete one-on-one with Burton and win. He'd
say she couldn't deal with the fact that some people were simply better at
things than she was.
Trudge, drag, trudge, drag.
So, okay, yes, she had an ego problem. She was an overambitious,
self-centered bitch. So what? It had gotten her this far, where a more
reasonable attitude would have left her back in the slums of greater
Levittown. Making do with an eight-by-ten room with bathroom rights
and a job as a dental assistant. Kelp and talapia every night, and rabbit on
Sunday. The hell with that. She was alive and Burton wasn'tтАФby any
rational standard that made her the winner.
"Are you. Listening?"
"Not really, no."
She topped yet another rise. And stopped dead. Down below was a dark
expanse of molten sulfur. It stretched, wide and black, across the streaked
orange plains. A lake. Her helmet readouts ran a thermal topography from
the negative 230┬░F at her feet of 65┬░F at the edge of the lava flow. Nice
and balmy. The molten sulfur itself, of course, existed at higher ambient
temperatures.
It lay dead in her way.

They'd named it Lake Styx.
Martha spent half an hour muttering over her topo maps, trying to
figure out how she'd gone so far astray. Not that it wasn't obvious. All that
stumbling around. Little errors that she'd made, adding up. A tendency to
favor one leg over the other. It had been an iffy thing from the beginning,
trying to navigate by dead reckoning.
Finally, though, it was obvious. Here she was. On the shores of Lake
Styx. Not all that far off course after all. Three miles, maybe, tops.
Despair filled her.
They'd named the lake during their first loop through the Galilean
system, what the engineers had called the "mapping run." It was one of
the largest features they'd seen that wasn't already on the maps from