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

'You safe, lady?' one asks. 'You probably got a bunch of kids, right?'

Right. Barkazil women are supposed to spend their lives pregnant. Aiah hunches
deeper into her jacket and walks over to the new lottery seller at a new,
improvised kiosk.

Both the old lottery seller and his kiosk had been turned to charcoal. Aiah
had bought a ticket from him every working day for the last three years and
never known his name.
A police motorcycle glides by with an efficient turbine whine. Glass crunches
underfoot as Aiah walks across Exchange to the Plasm Authority Building with
its jagged crown of bronze horns and its gaping windows. There are white paint
circles on the pavement, each with a bit of soot in the center that marks a
casualty, a human being turned into a carbonized husk. The pigeons have
already scattered droppings on them.

She knows what waits in her office. Telia's crying baby, the smell of dirty
diapers, stale coffee in the stale-smelling lounge with its broken window now
covered by plastic. The inevitable message cylinder on her desk, because three
months ago, trying to score a few points with higher authority, she'd
volunteered for Emergency Response.

And then, after the message is answered, long hours in shivering cold, far
underground, searching for plasm that will never be hers.

More words track across the sky. Snap! The World Drink, followed by the
green-and-white Snap logo. The resources necessary to track all that across
the sky during shift change are staggering, more than she'll make in her life.

A silent aerocar crosses the sky between Aiah and the logo, rising from the
roof of the Exchange. It inverts so the driver can view the city below,
enjoying a view Aiah knows she'll never see.

In a city that girdles the world, what is the worst thing imaginable?

Not having anyplace to go.

THREE MORE INDICTED IN TRACKLINE SCANDAL INTENDANT PROMISES CLEANUP

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,