"John Varley - Steel Beach" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

the desk terminal until it lighted up, and pressed my palm against a read-out
plate. My story was downloaded into the main computer in just under a
second. In another second, the printer started to chatter. Walter prefers hard
copy. He likes to make big blue marks on it. While I waited I looked out
over the city. My home town.
The News Nipple Tower is near the bottom of the J of King City. From
it you can see the clusters of other buildings that mark the sub-surface Malls.
The sun was still three days from rising. The lights of the city dwindled in
the distance and blended in with the hard, unblinking stars overhead.
Almost on the horizon are the huge, pearly domes of King City farms.
It's pretty by night, not so lovely by day. When the sun came up it
would bathe every exposed pipe and trash pile and abandoned rover in
unsympathetic light; night pulled a curtain over the shameful clutter.
Even the parts that aren't junk aren't all that attractive. Vacuum is useful
in many manufacturing processes and walls are of no use for most of them.
If something needed to be sheltered from sunlight, a roof was enough.
Loonies don't care about the surface. There's no ecology to preserve, no
reason at all to treat it as other than a huge and handy dumping ground. In
some places the garbage was heaped to the third story of the exterior
buildings. Give us another thousand years and we'll pile the garbage a
hundred meters deep from pole to pole.
There was very little movement. King City, on the surface, looked
bombed out, abandoned.
The printer finished its job and I handed the copy to a passing
messenger. Walter would call me about it when it suited him. I thought of
several things I could do in the meantime, failed to find any enthusiasm for
any of them. So I just sat there and stared out over the surface, and presently
I was called into the master's presence.
#
Walter Editor is what is known as a natural.
Not that he's a fanatic about it. He doesn't subscribe to one of those
cults that refuse all medical treatment developed since 1860, or 1945, or
2020. He's not impressed with faith healing. He's not a member of
Lifespan, those folks who believe it's a sin to live beyond the Biblical
threescore and ten, or the Centenarians, who set the number at one hundred.
He's just like most of the rest of us, prepared to live forever if medical
science can maintain a quality life for him. He'll accept any treatment that
will keep him healthy despite a monstrously dissolute life style.
He just doesn't care how he looks.
All the fads in body styling and facial arrangement pass him by. In the
twenty years I have known him he has never changed so much as his hair
style. He had been born maleтАФor so he once told meтАФone hundred and
twenty-six years ago, and had never Changed.
 His somatic development had been frozen in his mid-forties, a time he
often described to all who would listen as "the prime of life." As a result, he
was paunchy and balding. This suited Walter fine. He felt the editor of a
major planetary newspaper ought to be paunchy and balding.
An earlier age would have called Walter Editor a voluptuary. He was a
sensualist, a glutton, monstrously self-indulgent. He went through stomachs
in two or three years, used up a pair of lungs every decade or so, and needed