Charles Stross - Tarkovsky's Cut

VIP免费

2024-11-24 1 0 69.41KB 13 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Tarkovsky's Cut

by Charles Stross

Once a lifetime Jewel swims in the Folded Rose lagoon. She strikes out through the mirror-still

water until she can just make out the Hub wall, and then she swims a little further. She lies back

in the water and lets things pass her by for a while. On a clear day she can just make out, directly

above, the fields and forests she explored as a cild. She smiles, and maps the vague topology,

sharpening it with memories.

Then, for the first time in many years, she turns off her Wisdom, and thinks back, unaided, to

what it was like. The feel of landpussy fur. The strong savour of barbecued cockroach. The first

exquisite tickle of the Wisdom uplink behind her eyes. She swims in memories and falls like a

stone, into childhood, and into the black depths of the lake.

Now Jewel is an old woman again, nearing the end of her fortieth lifetime, and she is ready to

swim again.

She stands on the foredeck of the houseboat, fingering the jewel, which hangs on a silver chain

about her neck.

The craft turns in the water, and Jewel watches as the Hub -- a craggy, rust-stained rock wall --

swings into view. She looks up, and up and up. The rocks climb all the way to the forests of her

childhood -- there, on the opposite side of the oneil. The Hub's fault lines and discolorations are

not, like the lagoon, a builder's whim. They are real. The Heaven Eleven oneil is ten thousand

years old.

The houseboat is anchored to a smaller, grey and scree-swept slope, which curves so that its

lips meet the hub at either edge, forming a pouch some five hundred feet above the lagoon. In it lie

the remains of an ancient city and there, built over their ruined heart, stands the Folded Rose

Sanctuary. There are no landward approaches to the Sanctuary. The slopes, naturally rugged and

inhospitable, have been seeded with things lethal to man. Birdmen patrol the rocky crests,

watching for airborne intruders with senses enhanced by a secret process.

Jewel stretches in satisfaction and turns to the wrought-iron table. On it stands a small glass

cafetiere. She presses down on the filter arm and watches the brew darken. She pours herself a

cup and sits down. Soon she will have to go and kill her wife. As always, the thought of it excites

her.

She sips her coffee. They feed coffee berries to Wolfmen. As the berries are digested, so the

beans within them partly ferment. It has become a kind of ritual -- to drink wolf coffee before killing

her lovers.

Jewel opens a small bottle of hash oil and slurs it into her coffee. The scent is delicious.

She drinks, and rides the slow, gentle hashish swell into the First House of Contemplation.

She fingers the jewel around her neck. It has seventy facets -- one for each of her lives.

She thinks of her wife, and of their lovemaking. Marget's breasts are small and too far apart and

her orgasm is a raucous laugh. The taste of her wetness is rich and sickly.

Jewel withdraws from the play of images, and clasps her hands. Conciously now, she draws

from these erotic images the shapes and movements of Marget's body, the relative suppleness of

each limb in each plane. When she is finished she knows how to kill her.

She knows the poise to adopt, the angle to hit, the force necessary for the blow, and the speed

of the strike. This is the Second House.

Warmed by the drugged coffee, she unclenches her hands. The bright morning sunlight casts

shadows of her fingers onto the table beneath. She waves her fingers and the light threads over

the table. The movement of light and shade is erotic. She enters the Third House, and reads

violence into the movements of the shadows. Violence and sexuality fuse in a single, simple

rhythm.

Her breasts engorge.

The Census is over by evening. The stench of molten insulation drifts across the street from the

Recidivist's nest. By Three tomorrow morning, all subversives will be retrodden. The managing

director of the census, Harvey Mishima is in a teleconference with other officers of the Census.

His fellows appear behind his eyes, faces black with ash and hands sticky with housejuice. They

all have exactly the same smile.

"Report by numbers," Harvey drawls. He lifts up his legs and rests his feet comfortably on the

bar table. Harvey Mishima is a middle-aged retread who has been programmed to think that all

Recidivists should be recycled. His number two sits next to him, convinced that in some previous

incarnation she was Eva Braun. She likes killing ragheads.

A bartender mixes cocktails and twitches his whiskers nervously: Eva Braun is field-stripping

her gun.

Two. Seven subjects in the block, now cared for.

Three. None in the block, but we found a sewer rat.

The bartender twitches its whiskers in terror.

Four grunts and howls and masturbates in front of the camera. Semantic engines do their best

to draw meaning from the display. Four is a psychopath on test-release from the Domino Factory.

He's killed as many beastmen as Recidivists.

Five. None in the block. Tried to link with six but got whitenoise.

Six. A practical knowledge of nursing the elderly is essential, but not necessarily gained in the

private sector.

Harvey's Wisdom tries making sense of the whitenoise where six should be. Harvey turns it off

and spits. He calls up Cleansing, using his Wisdom to port a description of Six to them.

No dice. He turns to Eva. "Six is out -- alive and missing."

The ratman sets their drinks down at the table.

"Too slow," Eva drawls and blows him to bloody fragments all over the plastic fascia of the bar.

"Eva," Harvey sighs, "are you listening?"

"Sure," says Eva. She drops on all fours and sniffs the ratman's roast remains

Harvey drains his drink. "Mixed a good cocktail," he says.

Eva grunts. Her mouth is full.

Wolfmen trace Six's scent, and find a house. It lies on a slant, mouthparts buried deep in the

conduit running under the road. Sawtooths drill the door to bits and find Alia in the bedroom. They

pin her to the wall with beetle limbs and chew off her clothing. Wolfmen slavering toxin and

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

Charles Stross - Tarkovsky's Cut.pdf

共13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！

Charles Stross - Tarkovsky's Cut

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: