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

We've seen it in some of the other runaways, you lose your calcium
after a while. Your bones go all punky, you know?"
My eyesтАФ
"We're airlifting a 'scaphe out to you. We'll have a team down
there in fifteen hours, tops. Just go down into the shelter and wait
for them. It's state of the art, Judy, it'll take care of everything."
She looks down into the open box. Words appear in her head:
Leg. Hold. Trap. She knows what they mean.
8 Peter Watts

"TheyтАФthey made some mistakes, Judy. But things are different
now. We don't have to change people any more. You just wait
there, Judy. We'll put you back to rights. We'll bring you home."
The voices inside grow quiet, suddenly attentive. They don't like
the sound of that word. Home. She wonders what it means. She
wonders why it makes her feel so cold.
More words scroll through her mind: The lights are on.
Nobody's home.
The lights come on, flickering.
She can catch glimpses of sick, rotten things squirming in her
head. Old memories grind screeching against years of corrosion.
Something lurches into sudden focus: worms, clusters of
twitching, eyeless, pulpy snouts reaching out for her across the
space of two decades. She stares, horrified, and remembers what
the worms were called. They were called "fingers".
Something gives way with a snap. There's a big room and a
hand puppet clenched in one small fist. Something smells like
mints and worms are surging up between her legs and they hurt
and they're whispering shhh it's not really that bad is it, and it is
but she doesn't want to let him down after all I've done for you so
she shakes her head and squeezes her eyes shut and just waits. It's
years and years before she opens her eyes again and when she does
he's back, so much smaller now, he doesn't remember he doesn't
even fucking remember it's all my dear how you've grown how
long has it been? So she tells him as the taser wires hit and he
goes over, she tells him as his muscles lock tight in a twelve
thousand volt orgasm; she shows him the blade, shows him up
real close and his left eye deflates with a wet tired sigh but she
leaves the other one, jiggling hilariously in frantic little arcs, so he
can watch but shit for once there really is a cop around when you
need one and here come the worms again, a hard clenched knot of
them driving into her kidney like a piston, worms grabbing her
hair, and they take her not to the nearest precinct but to some
strange clinic where voices in the next room murmur about optimal
post-traumatic environments and endogenous dopamine addiction.
And then someone says There's an alternative Ms. Caraco, a place
you could go that's a little bit dangerous but then you'd be right at
Home 9

home there, wouldn't you? And you could make a real