"Walter Jon Williams - Metropolitan - 01 - Metropolitan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

The Plasm Authority Building is broad and high and powerful, built for the creation, storage and transmission of plasm. It stands in careful relationship to the other buildings of the financial/government district, relationships in which weight, design and core construction are carefully balanced. The carbon-steel supports form an intricate generation web insulated from the exterior by white granite. Its thorny crown of transmission horns reaches into the sky like grasping fingers. The outside bronze collection web, with its roots deep in bedrock, curls over the granite in shining arabesques, brutally functional ornamentation meant to attract, gather, and disperse any plasm threatening to endanger the building itself - break any attack into fragments, deprive it of will, then store it for use by the Authority's own heresiarchs.

If the burning woman had touched the building with her tendrils of flame, she would have cried and trembled and vanished, her energies sucked into the building's structure before being dispersed through the city grid.

But she hadn't touched the building, had in whatever was left of her reasoning mind known that the bronze traceries meant danger. Instead the Jurisdiction had to divert its resources to her destruction, had snuffed her by brute force, a burst of power transmitted from the bronze transmission horns.

The building is less impressive when seen close up. Fifty other anonymous employees enter with Aiah beneath the bronze-sheathed, grime-encrusted archway mosaic that shows the Goddess of Transmission Dispensing Her Glory to the People. With twenty of the new arrivals - she doesn't know one of them Ч she experiences the peculiarly liquid motion of one of the building's hydraulic elevators.

On the tenth floor the first thing Aiah hears is the wailing of Telia's baby. The halls are covered by brown ribbed plastic runways intended to protect crumbling floor tiles. The doors are of battered metal painted dull green. The furniture is battered metal painted dull gray. The walls are green with a gray stripe. The ceiling is tin and its holes reveal wiring. There are no windows.

Welcome to the civil service, she thinks. Welcome to a secure future.

'Hi,' Telia says. She's changing Jayme's diapers on the top of her desk.

Aiah wants to shout down to the insurance hawker: See? Jaspeeris do too have kids!

Baby stool glints greenly in the fluorescents. 'Big meeting at ten,' Tella says. I expected.'

'How's your neck?'

Aiah touches her scorched nape beneath pinned-up hair. 'All right.'

'At least you didn't get any glass cuts. Calla from Tabulation was looking right at her window when it blew in. She almost lost an eye.'

'Which one's Calla?'

'Auburn hair. Married to Emtes from Billing.'

Aiah doesn't know him either. She looks down at her desk, the computer with its glowing yellow dials, the scalar, the logbook.

Gil's picture in its gleaming wetsilver frame.

The baby gives another shriek. Telia smiles, half-apologetic. 'Healthy lungs, huh?'

Telia hadn't wanted to leave her kid in the Authority's creche all day, looked after by disinterested functionaries and subjected to every epidemic sweeping Jaspeer. She'd asked Aiah if she minded her keeping Jayme in the office, and Aiah had said it was all right.

She'd said it reluctantly. She had been raised in a big family, not only siblings but cousins and nephew and nieces all jammed together in tiny government apartments in a Barkazil neighborhood Ч it would suit her perfectly well if she was never around small children again.

No less than three message cylinders sit in her wire basket. Aiah opens them, finds they're all about the meeting, all from different supervisors.

Evidently there is chaos at the top.

Her computer's yellow dials glow at her.

She peels lace back from her wrist and pens a reply on each message, puts each back in its cylinder, and looks on her plastic-covered list to double-check each supervisor's pneumatic address. She dials each address on the little gears on the end of each cylinder, then feeds them, one by one, into the pneumatic message system. Each is tugged from her fingers by the hissing suction of the tube, and she pictures them bulleting through darkness, destination as fixed as that of passengers on the trackline shuttle.

In a city as big as the world, what is the worst thing?

To be twenty-five years old, and to know exactly how one will spend the rest of one's life.