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

waiting for the rains. Bladders of isotonic saline cling to its limbs
like engorged antiparasites, like the opposite of leeches. You
remember the needles going in just before you shut down, way
back when your veins were more than dry twisted filaments of beef
jerky.
Szpindel's reflection stares back from his own pod to your
immediate right. His face is as bloodless and skeletal as yours.
His wide sunken eyes jiggle in their sockets as he reacquires his
own links, sensory interfaces so massive that your own off-the-
shelf inlays amount to shadow-puppetry in comparison.
You hear coughing and the rustling of limbs just past line-of-
sight, catch glimpses of reflected motion where the others stir at
the edge of vision.
"WhaтАФ" Your voice is barely more than a hoarse whisper. "тАж
happтАж?"
Szpindel works his jaw. Bone cracks audibly.
"тАжSssuckered," he hisses.
You haven't even met the aliens yet, and already they're running
rings around you.

*

So we dragged ourselves back from the dead: five part-time
cadavers, naked, emaciated, barely able to move even in zero gee.
We emerged from our coffins like premature moths ripped from
their cocoons, still half-grub. We were alone and off course and
utterly helpless, and it took a conscious effort to remember: they
would never have risked our lives if we hadn't been essential.
"Morning, commissar." Isaac Szpindel reached one trembling,
Peter Watts 14 Blindsight

insensate hand for the feedback gloves at the base of his pod. Just
past him, Susan James was curled into a loose fetal ball,
murmuring to herselves. Only Amanda Bates, already dressed and
cycling through a sequence of bone-cracking isometrics, possessed
anything approaching mobility. Every now and then she tried
bouncing a rubber ball off the bulkhead; but not even she was up to
catching it on the rebound yet.
The journey had melted us down to a common archetype. James'
round cheeks and hips, Szpindel's high forehead and lumpy, lanky
chassisтАФeven the enhanced carboplatinum brick shit-house that
Bates used for a bodyтАФ all had shriveled to the same desiccated
collection of sticks and bones. Even our hair seemed to have
become strangely discolored during the voyage, although I knew
that was impossible. More likely it was just filtering the pallor of
the skin beneath. Still. The pre-dead James had been dirty blond,
Szpindel's hair had been almost dark enough to call blackтАФ but the
stuff floating from their scalps looked the same dull kelpy brown to
me now. Bates kept her head shaved, but even her eyebrows
weren't as rusty as I remembered them.