"John Varley - The Barbie Murders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

The Barbie Murders



THE BARBIE MURDERS
John Varley
"The Barbie Murders" was purchased by George Scithers, and appeared in the
January/February 1978 issue of Asimov's, with a cover by Paul Alexander and an interior
illustration by Jack Gaughan. Some of Varley's earliest stories appeared in Asimov's, two
of them in our very first issue (one of them his classic story "Air Raid'), and although the
magazine has seen less of him in recent years as his career as a novelist predominated, we
still hope to coax more stories out of him in the future. John Varley appeared on the SF
scene in 1975, and by the end of 1976-in what was a meteoric rise to prominence even for
a field known for meteoric rises-he was already being recognized as one of the hottest new
writers of the seventies. His books include the novels Ophiuchi Hotline, Titan, Wizard, and
Demon, and the collections The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, Picnic on
Nearside, and Blue Champagne. His most recent book was the major novel, Steel Beach.
He has won two Nebulas and two Hugos for his short fiction.

In the vivid and wildly inventive high-tech thriller that follows, one of SF's best murder
mysteries, he postulates a case where the detective, before he can determine Who Done It,
first has to figure which of the suspects is which ...


The body came to the morgue at 2246 hours. No one paid much attention to it. It was a Saturday night,
and the bodies were piling up like logs in a millpond. A harried attendant working her way down the row
of stainless steel tables picked up the sheaf of papers that came with the body, peeling back the sheet over
the face. She took a card from her pocket and scrawled on it, copying from the reports filed by the
investigating officer and the hospital staff:

Ingraham, Leah Petrie. Female. Age: 35. Length: 2.1 meters. Mass: 59 kilograms. Dead on arrival,
Crisium Emergency Terminal. Cause of death: homicide. Next of kin: unknown.

She wrapped the wire attached to the card around the left big toe, slid the dead weight from the table and
onto the wheeled carrier, took it to cubicle 659a, and rolled out the long tray.

The door slammed shut, and the attendant placed the paperwork in the out tray, never noticing that, in his
report, the investigating officer had not specified the sex of the corpse.

Lieutenant Anna-Louise Bach had moved into her new office three days ago and already the paper on her
desk was threatening to avalanche onto the floor.



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 The Barbie Murders

To call it an office was almost a perversion of the term. It had a file cabinet for pending cases; she could
open it only at severe risk to life and limb. The drawers had a tendency to spring out at her, pinning her in
her chair in the corner. To reach "A" she had to stand on her chair; "Z" required her either to sit on her