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

"Your mother was a garbage truck," I said, and kicked it in the rubber
skirt.
"Undoubtedly, sir. Thank you, sir. Please come back soon, sir."
#
"Who programmed that toadying thing?" I wondered, later.
"Somebody with a lot of lipstick on his ass," Cricket said. "What are
you so sour about? It's just a short walk. Take in the scenery."
It was a rather pleasant place, I had to admit. There were very few
people around. You grow up with the odor of people all around you, all the
time, and you really notice it when the scent is gone. I took a deep breath
and smelled freshly-poured concrete. I drank the sights and sounds and
scents of a new-born world: the sharp primary colors of wire bundles
sprouting from unfinished walls like the first buds on a bare bough, the
untarnished gleam of copper, silver, gold, aluminum, titanium; the whistle of
air through virgin ducts, undeflected, unmuffled, bringing with it the crisp
sharpness of the light machine oil that for centuries has coated new
machinery, fresh from the factory . . . all these things had an effect on me.
They meant warmth, security, safety from the eternal vacuum, the victory of
humanity over the hostile forces that never slept. In a word, progress.
I began to relax a little. We picked our way through jumbles of stainless
steel and aluminum and plastic and glass building components and I felt a
peace as profound as I suspect a Kansas farmer of yesteryear might have
felt, looking out over his rippling fields of wheat.
"Says here they've got an option where you can have sex over the
telephone."
Cricket had gotten a few paces ahead of me, and she was reading from
the UniBio faxpad handout.
"That's nothing new. People started having sex over the telephone about
ten minutes after Alexander Graham Bell invented it."
"You're pulling my leg. Nobody invented sex."
I liked Cricket, though we were rivals. She works for The Straight Shit,
Luna's second largest padloid, and has already made a name for herself even
though she's not quite thirty years old. We cover many of the same stories
so we see a lot of each other, professionally.
She'd been female all the time I'd known her, but she'd never shown any
interest in the tentative offers I had made. No accounting for taste. I'd about
decided it was a matter of sexual orientationтАФone doesn't ask. It had to be
that. If not, it meant she just wasn't interested in me. Altogether unlikely.
Which was a shame, either way, because I'd harbored a low-grade lust
for her for three years.
"'Simply attach the Tinglemodem (sold separately) to the primary
sensory cluster,'" she read, "'and it's as if your lover were in the room with
you.' I'll bet Mr. Bell didn't figure on that."
Cricket had a child-like face with an upturned nose and a brow that
tended to wrinkle appealingly when she was thinkingтАФall carefully
calculated, I have no doubt, but no less exciting because of that. She had a
short upper lip and a long lower one. I guess that doesn't sound so great, but
Cricket made it work. She had one green, normal eye, and the other one was
red, without a pupil. My eyes were the same except the normal one was
brown. The visible red eyes of the press never sleep.