"Michael Swanwick - Trojan Horse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

"I don't ever want to hear that name again," a tech grumbled.



"You mustn't confuse God with what you've just seen," Landis admonished.
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"Hey, come on!" Hans said. "She moved time backwards or something. I saw it myself. This place
exploded-doesn't that prove something?"



Landis grinned, reached out to ruffle his hair. "Sometimes I worry about you, Hans. You have an awfully
small concept of God." Several of the drinkers laughed.



He blushed, said, "No, really."



"Well, I'll try to keep this"- she leaned forward, rapped her mug against the rock, "fill this up again,
hey?-keep it simple. We had analysts crawl up and down Coral's descrip-tion of the universe, and did
you know there was no place in it anywhere for such things as mercy, hope, faith? No, we got an
amalgam of substrates, supraprograms, and self-metaediting physics. Now what makes God superior to
us is not just intellect-we've all known some damn clever bastards. And it's not just power, or I could go
and buy an atomic device on the black market and start my own religion.



"No, by definition God is my moral superior. Now I myself am but indifferently honest-but to Coral,
moral con-siderations don't even exist. Get it?''



Only Elin noticed the haunted, hopeless light in Landis's eyes or realized that she was spinning words
effortlessly, without conscious control. Deep within, the woman was caught in a private crisis of faith.



"Yeah, I guess." Hans scratched his head. "I'd still like to know just what happened between her and
Tory there at the end."



"I can answer that," a wetware tech said. The others turned to face her, and she smirked, the center of
attention. "What the hell, they plant the censor blocks in us all tomorrow-this is probably my only chance