"Peter Watts - Blindsight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

been able to even guess at the number of his victims, because his
affect was so utterly without remorse. The killing of a hundred
would leave no more stain on Sarasti's surfaces than the swatting of
an insect; guilt beaded and rolled off this creature like water on
wax.
But Sarasti wasn't human. Sarasti was a whole different animal,
and coming from him all those homicidal refractions meant
nothing more than predator. He had the inclination, was born to it;
whether he had ever acted on it was between him and Mission
Control.
Maybe they cut you some slack, I didn't say to him. Maybe it's
just a cost of doing business. You're mission-critical, after all.
For all I know you cut a deal. You're so very smart, you know we
wouldn't have brought you back in the first place if we hadn't
needed you. From the day they cracked the vat you knew you had
leverage.
Is that how it works, Jukka? You save the world, and the folks
who hold your leash agree to look the other way?
As a child I'd read tales about jungle predators transfixing their
prey with a stare. Only after I'd met Jukka Sarasti did I know how
it felt. But he wasn't looking at me now. He was focused on
installing his own tent, and even if he had looked me in the eye
there'd have been nothing to see but the dark wraparound visor he
wore in deference to Human skittishness. He ignored me as I
Peter Watts 19 Blindsight

grabbed a nearby rung and squeezed past.
I could have sworn I smelled raw meat on his breath.
Into the drum (drums, technically; the BioMed hoop at the back
spun on its own bearings). I flew through the center of a cylinder
sixteen meters across. Theseus' spinal nerves ran along its axis, the
exposed plexii and piping bundled against the ladders on either
side. Past them, Szpindel's and James' freshly-erected tents rose
from nooks on opposite sides of the world. Szpindel himself
floated off my shoulder, still naked but for his gloves, and I could
tell from the way his fingers moved that his favorite color was
green. He anchored himself to one of three stairways to nowhere
arrayed around the drum: steep narrow steps rising five vertical
meters from the deck into empty air.
The next hatch gaped dead-center of the drum's forward wall;
pipes and conduits plunged into the bulkhead to each side. I
grabbed a convenient rung to slow myselfтАФbiting down once more
on the painтАФand floated through.
T-junction. The spinal corridor continued forward, a smaller
diverticulum branched off to an EVA cubby and the forward
airlock. I stayed the course and found myself back in the crypt,
mirror-bright and less than two meters deep. Empty pods gaped to
the left; sealed ones huddled to the right. We were so irreplaceable
we'd come with replacements. They slept on, oblivious. I'd met
three of them back in training. Hopefully none of us would be