Brian Stableford - Busy Dying

VIP免费

2024-11-24 1 0 47.83KB 15 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stapleford%20-%20Busy%20Dying.txt

BRIAN STAPLEFORD - Busy Dying

HE COULDN'T REMEMBER whether he'd ever been to that particular spot before, but

the open plaza looked vaguely familiar. As he climbed the ugly centerpiece of

the fountain, aiming for the pagoda-like roof above the bug-eyed gargoyles, he

seemed to be reaching for familiar footholds. They were already shouting his

name, but that didn't mean a thing; he supposed that he'd be recognized in any

of a hundred cities, in any of four hundred malls. He was quite a celebrity.

By the time he reached his selected coign of vantage a thousand people were

converging on the fountain. The design of the atrium was such that the crowds on

the second, third, and fourth floors had as good a view as the people at ground

level, and the escalators were crammed with excited gesticulators hoping that

the moving stairways wouldn't carry them too far before the show began.

He checked his watch. Give it ten, he thought, beginning to count down.

He knew there were a dozen security cameras on him and that anyone in the crowd

with a camcorder would be pointing it at him already, but the CNI were probably

all ready to go with an injunction against any mall in this or any other city,

and you couldn't trust amateurs to produce A-1 footage even with today's

technological aids. He figured that ten seconds ought to be enough to bring down

a few newsdrones. Even the networks posted drones in mails these days, and not

just because of him. Malls were the commercial arteries of the nation, and

mallnews was always a big item in the human interest slots.

At five he uncapped the can, and threw the cap into the crowd so that the kids

could fight over it. At seven he began to pour, so that he would be ready to

drop the can into the rippled pool of the fountain at nine.

Smoothly, with practiced competence, he struck the match with his fingernail. Is

that slick, or is that slick, he asked himself. He had always cared about

matters of style.

His sneakers were still squelching and the legs of his pants were soaked from

his dash across the pool, but he knew it wouldn't matter. The rest of him was

soaked with something infinitely less inclined to dampen the spirits.

The flames came up about him with an audible whoosh, and black smoke billowed

forth. For a second or two -- but it might have been an olfactory illusion -- he

thought that he could smell his own flesh burning.

Wow, he thought.

Wow! Wow! Wow!

When her bleeper went off Margaret Percik woke up with a sudden start, surprised

and slightly guilty about the fact that she'd nodded off.

She didn't need to check her wristphone; it was Emily signaling that Walter

Murray was recovering consciousness. She hurried, intent on arriving before he

removed the skimskin sealing his eyelids, but she needn't have bothered. The

monitoring devices had blown the whistle on him but Walter was playing possum.

He hadn't moved a muscle; he was probably playing for time while he tried to

figure out who and what and where he was. Thanks to him, doctors now knew that

death usually caused temporary amnesia, and he had had enough practice dying to

have developed habitual methods of dealing with the condition.

As she checked the instruments she felt sure that he was tracking her movements

with avid ears. He flinched, though, when Emily checked his waste-disposal

tubes. She carefully peeled the skimskin away from his eyes, and he opened them,

blinking against the light. He had to close the lids again for a second or two,

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stapleford%20-%20Busy%20Dying.txt (1 of 15) [10/16/2004 4:38:07 PM]

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stapleford%20-%20Busy%20Dying.txt

but when he could keep them open they focused readily enough on her face: no

lasting damage there.

He looked up at her without recognition. Emily moved to the head of the bed so

that he could study them both. She and Emily were as handsome as one another but

not in the least alike, in spite of the fact that they were wearing severely

clinical white coats. Margaret was dark and stem and so comprehensively imaged

for authority that she was almost austere; Emily was fairer and softer and

decorated. Nobody was supposed to be able to tell a woman's age anymore, but

that was bullshit. Wrinkles or no wrinkles, Margaret knew, it was obvious to

anyone with half an eye that Emily was an absolutely authentic twenty-one,

whereas she herself was fifty-five and then some.

Margaret darted a quick glance at Emily, to make sure that she was paying

attention. It was important, according to their agreed procedure, that they both

looked at him without the slightest trace of sympathy or admiration.

"Can you remember who you are?" Margaret asked.

There was a twenty second gap before he replied. Finally, he said, "I seem to

have temporarily misplaced my name. I'm sorry."

"You were very lucky, Mr. Murray," she said. "If you hadn't fallen into the

fountain. . . . "

That drew a slight reaction -- as if the horror of it had hit him like a punch

in the gut, although he couldn't quite fathom out why the thought was so

horrible.

"What fountain?" he said, in a puzzled fashion. "Murray, you say? Is that my

name -- Murray?"

"You shouldn't play with fire, Mr. Murray," said Margaret, as sternly as she

could. "It isn't like the knives and the ropes. We can regenerate burned

brain-tissue, but not the field-states which inhabited it before it was burned.

Try this one again, Mr: Murray, and you might come back first cousin to a

cabbage. I guess you already qualify as a zombie ten times over, but this time

you were just a few seconds away from being a hundred-forty pounds of fresh meat

with vacant possession. As I said, if you hadn't fallen into the fountain. . . .

"Do I know you?" he asked.

She did her level best to look at him as though he were some kind of insect

crawling around the drawer where she kept her underwear.

"Yes, Mr. Murray," she said sourly. "You know me. And you also know Mr.

Stepanova. He's waiting for a call to tell him that you're awake. He has some

news for you."

She picked up a remote from the instrument-console beside the bed and punched

out a sequence; the wallscreen at the far end of the room flickered blue,

displayed the relevant codes, and then dissolved into a picture.

Stepanova had been waiting to make the call; Emily had bleeped him at the same

time she'd bleeped Margaret. He was looking straight into the camera, as

purposefully as any man could. He'd been chiseled for it, but it wasn't an

overly impressive job. Every man of a certain age went in for that kind of

power-dressing of the features, and it rather nullified the effect.

"You're busted, Murray," said Stepanova, with a bitter wrath he did not need to

feign. "This is the end. We've got an injunction from the Supreme Court banning

you from making any further use whatsoever of any product manufactured by the

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stapleford%20-%20Busy%20Dying.txt (2 of 15) [10/16/2004 4:38:07 PM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Brian Stableford - Busy Dying.pdf

共15页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Brian Stableford - Busy Dying

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: