"Ian Watson - Saving for a Sunny Day" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

which in fact she'd already embarked on anticipatively on the strength of a very high interest loan from her
parents. That's why her nickname in school was Jools. Sharon really adorned herself, and there was
increasingly more of her to adorn due to her liking for very creamy gourmet meringues; already she had
false teeth, the best that money could buy, much better than her original teeth. Indeed she wore jewels on
her teeth where other girls might have braces. She was a real princess. It's always fun to have an airhead
princess around, especially if she hands out gifts willy-nilly to stay popular.

"Don't you bother about your Mom and Dad charging you five hundred per cent?тАЭ Jimmy asked her one
day.

"They needed to borrow the money at one hundred per cent."

"Bit of a mark-up."

"People have to make their way.тАЭ She grinned sparklingly. тАЬMost people have to."
Jimmy wondered what Jools could have done in her previous life to make a fortune. Had she been the
trophy wife of a billionaire? Surely not even a high-class prostitute could have amassed as much as Jools
claimed! Maybe she really had been a princess or a queen.

Jimmy hadn't kept quiet about his huge debt, so as to balance off in other people's mindsтАФin addition to
his physical demeritsтАФhis evident genius, which might otherwise have caused resentment.

And then at the other end of the scale there was Tamara Dexter, who owed a lot, and who wasn't
remarkably bright, though she showed signs of developing significant non-financial assets. She did talk
about prostitution as a solution, so she was keeping herself pure and pristine for better value.

"Surely you'll need to practice,тАЭ Jimmy said to her a year or so later. тАЬYou know, positions and dexterity
and whatnot."

"Not with you!тАЭ Tamara retorted, as if Jimmy was concocting an ingenious plan to seduce her as soon as
puberty arrived.

"A client might be ugly,тАЭ he observed, just to tease her.

"I'm going to major in gymnastics,тАЭ she declared.
****
A scientific genius often has his best ideas when fairly young. Given the head-start benefit of
reincarnation, by the age of twelve Jimmy was tutoring the math and science teachers a bit after school.
More importantly, he'd drafted a general theory of soul bar-coding. It needed to be a general
theoryтАФabout the principles involvedтАФbecause the bar code on a soul wasn't visible, no more than the
soul itself was visible.

CAT-scanning the brainтАФor the heart, or any of your organs or limbs for that matterтАФwas no help at all
in locating a barcode. So how did the actual bar-code scanners function? Well, the A.I. had designed
those, and organised their mass-production and useтАФand the bar-code scanners delivered the goods, or
rather a long number which was probably encrypted.

You might visualize a striped soul, with thick and thin bars on itтАФinvisiblyтАФbut that probably didn't
correspond to reality if the soul was distributed, say, in an electromagnetic somatic aura, or subtle body.
Subtle, as opposed to physical. Etheric.