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

I stretched out on top of her and we kissed.
We disarranged some of my clothes. She wasn't wearing enough to
worry about. Soon we were moving to rhythms it had taken Mother Nature
well over a billion years to compose. It was awkward, messy, it lacked
flexibility and probably didn't show much imagination. It sure wasn't
ULTRA-Tingle. That didn't prevent it from being wonderful.
"Wow," she whispered, as I rolled off her and we lay side by side on the
grass. "That was really . . . obsolete."
"Not nearly as obsolete as it was for me."
We looked at each other and burst out laughing.
After a while, she sat up and glanced at the figures displayed on her
wrist.
"Deadline in three hours," she said.
 "Me, too." We heard a low hum, looked up, and saw our old friend the
hoverlimo headed in our direction. We ran to catch it, leaped over the
rubber skirt and landed with seven others, who grumbled and groused and
eventually made room for us.
"I am overjoyed to transport you," said the hoverlimo.
"I take that back about the garbage truck," I said.
"Thank you, sir."
 CHAPTER TWO




This is not a mystery story. The people you will meet along the way are
not suspects. The things that happen to them are not clues. I promise not to
gather everyone together at the end and dramatically denounce a culprit.
This is not an adventure story. The survival of the universe will not be
thrown into jeopardy during the course of it. Some momentous events will
occur, and I was present at some of them but, like most of us, I was simply
picked up by the tornado of history and deposited, like Judy Garland, in a
place I never expected to be. I had little or no hand in the outcome. In fact,
this being real life and not an adventure story, it can be said there has been
no outcome. Some things will change, and some will remain the same, and
most things will simply go on as they were. If I were a writer of adventure
fiction, if I were manufacturing myself as the adventure's protagonist, I
would certainly have placed myself in the center of more of the plot's
turning points. I would have had myself plunging into peril, fighting mighty
battles, and saving humanity, or something like that. Instead, many of the
most important things I'm going to tell you about happened far from my
sight. I just tried to stay alive . . .
Don't expect me to draw my sword and set things aright. Even if I had a
sword and knew how to use it, I seldom saw an unambiguous target, and
when I thought I did it was too large and too far away for my puny
swordsmanship to have any effect.
This is not a nuts-and-bolts story. Here you will findтАФamong many
other howlersтАФthe Hildy Johnson Explanation of Nanobots, their uses,
functions, and methods of working. I'm sure much of it is wildly inaccurate,
and all of it is surely written about fifty I.Q. points below the layman's level .