"Peter Watts - Flesh Made Word" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

down. Wescott studied the dead face, peeled back the unclenched
eyelid with a pair of forceps. The static pupil beneath stared past
him, fixed at infinity.
You took the news well, Wescott thought.
He remembered Lynne. She was standing to one side, her face
averted.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I know this is never a good time, but
it's-"
He waited.
"It's Zombie," she went on. "There was an accident, Russ, he
wandered out on the road and--and I took him into the vet's and she
says he's too badly hurt but she won't put him to sleep without your
consent, you never listed me as an owner--"
She stopped, like a flash flood ending.
He looked down at the floor. "Put him to sleep?"
"She said it's almost certain anything they tried wouldn't work,
it would cost thousands and he'd probably die anyway--"
"You mean kill him. She won't kill him without my consent."
Wescott began stripping the leads from the cadaver, lining them up
on their brackets. They hung there like leeches, their suckers slimy
with conductant.
"--and all I could think was, after eighteen years he shouldn't die
alone, someone should be there with him, but I can't, you know, I
just--"
Somewhere at the base of his skull, a tiny voice cried out My
Christ don't I go through enough of this shit without having to
3 Watts

watch it happen to my own cat? But it was very far away, and he
could barely hear it.
He looked at the table. The corpse stared it's cyclopean stare.
"Sure," Wescott said after a moment. "I'll take care of it." He
allowed himself a half-smile. "All in a day's work."


The workstation sat in one corner of the living room, an ebony
cube of tinted perspex, and for the past ten years it had spoken to
him in Carol's voice. That had hurt at first, so much that he had
nearly changed the program; but he had fought the urge, and beaten
it, and endured the synthetic familiarity of her voice like a man
doing penance for some great sin. Somewhere in the past decade
the pain had faded below the level of conscious recognition. Now
he heard it list the day's mail, and felt nothing.
"Jason Mosby called again from Southam," it said, catching
Carol's intonation perfectly. "He s-still wants to interview you. He
left a conversational program in my stack. You can run it any time
you want."
"What else?"
"Zombie's collar stopped transmitting at nine sixteen, and
Zombie didn't s-show up for his afternoon feed. Y-You might