Кевин Андерсон – Resurrection Inc. (страница 14)
“It happened three times, four times. I can’t make sense of the flashes,” Danal answered, puzzled. “I can feel the information there, just waiting to be triggered by … something. And when it does, it comes in a burst, unconnected, like a line of text lifted at random out of a file.”
Danal found a trail of footprints in the sand on the holographic beach, eroding as the tide washed in. The waves were tipped with gentle but dramatic whitecaps as they curled in toward shore, trapped motionless in three dimensions by the hologram. Absently Danal changed the view again, following the footprints.
“And what do these flashes show?” Van Ryman got up to pour himself a second snifter of scotch. Danal could tell by his Master’s careful movements that he remained intent on Danal’s answer. “Anything you see here, perhaps? In this house?”
“Yes,” the Servant said slowly. “Yes, I feel a sense of familiarity about some things. And you, Master Van Ryman—it was very strong when I first saw you in the hall. Does any of this make sense?”
The man stood up with bright eyes, grinning. “More than you can know, Danal.” Van Ryman seemed barely able to contain his excitement. “And these flashbacks, do you think they’re messages? Messages from beyond death, communications from Satan Himself? Pointing out that there’s something special about this house, about
Danal paused, then answered carefully. “I’m not sure, Master Van Ryman. That’s a possible interpretation.” It wasn’t the right one, Danal thought, but Van Ryman already knew what he wanted to hear.
The dark-haired man nearly shouted with excitement and rubbed his hands together. His voice carried a whispered awe that Danal found frightening.
“It means we are expected!”
In the hologram two people lay naked and laughing by a rock outcropping on the wet sand: a man who appeared to be Van Ryman himself, smiling and at peace, with calm eyes; the other, a thin and supple woman, whose clean blond hair had been darkened by sea water and sand.
The young woman—Julia?—stared out of the hologram at Danal, taunting his memory with her crystal-blue eyes. Her narrow features were dimpled and elfin, almost wraithlike. A gull hung up in the sky, and tide pools were scattered in the pockmarked black rock stretching out into the water, waiting for the waves. Julia had just tossed a stone into one of the larger pools, and the ripples echoed outward in perfect circles. The Van Ryman in the picture was watching her, though—not the stone, not the waves, not the gull. It seemed so different.
Alarmed, Danal folded the picture completely into his memory with all the speed the microprocessor would allow him. In the study, the real Van Ryman was too excited to notice the people in the picture for an instant, and Danal’s fingers flew to the “Reset” button on the hologram, returning it to the default view of a serene and desolate oceanscape.
For some reason Danal didn’t want Van Ryman to see the quiet, intimate picture. Irrational. Van Ryman was
Everything tumbled around in his head, letting the spurts of memory ricochet off themselves. Nothing resolved itself. Nothing made sense. But his Servant programming threatened to override—Danal had no right to question his Master, nor would he dare to.
He turned to face Van Ryman before anything else could happen, before he could lose his calm and passive Servant facade. “I am very tired now, Master Van Ryman. May I go to my room to rest?”
The man was too delighted to pay much attention to the Servant. “Yes, yes, of course! Thank you very much, Danal. I’ll have to call Nathans right away.”
Pressure built up in Danal’s memory, and he reeled as he wandered out of the study. Too many impressions were striking his underloaded brain, and his mind would soon be a tangled mass of contradictions. Now truly weary, he went toward his room. He wanted to sleep … and to forget.
He left the study and walked down a hall, past a central sitting area and a wide, blue-carpeted staircase leading upstairs; above, a carved railing set off the walkway from where it overlooked the first level. The kitchen and dining areas, as well as the terrarium room, were through the sitting room and in another wing, but Danal walked blindly past the stairs and past the small sauna to a large room, a bedroom.
“Danal! Command: Stop! Where are you going?”
On Command phrase the Servant’s muscles locked up and refused to function. Van Ryman bustled up in his green robe, looking suddenly uneasy again. Danal stood motionless and saw that he had almost entered the master bedroom of the Van Ryman mansion.
“I was trying to find my room, Master Van Ryman.”
The man paused for a moment in indecision. The silence was magnified by Danal’s distorted perception of time. “Well it certainly isn’t
“Servants are not supposed to ask questions, Master Van Ryman.”
Leaving Van Ryman trapped by the truth of the statement, Danal brushed past him and went back to the stairs.
Francois Nathans paused alone in the doorway of an apartment building across from Resurrection, Inc. Carefully adjusting his disguise, he let his eyes grow accustomed to the sunshine before he emerged onto the crowded street. The wind had picked up, ruffling the pedestrians’ hair as they moved back and forth. A lost piece of paper curled along the ground, brushing up against many legs that paid it no heed.
Nathans stood, waiting for the subtle transition to happen, for him to become an anonymous pedestrian. As far as anyone else could see, he was just another employee of a local business park, living in an island of apartment buildings surrounded by office complexes. Nathans breathed the outside air and set out, confident.
More and more often Nathans found himself using the passage from his private offices in the deep lower levels of Resurrection, Inc. to Apartment 117 in the complex across the street. It felt good to be alone, away from the pressures, and he had found no greater isolation than when he was surrounded by a thousand strangers.
Nathans wore a stiff denim jacket and black pants with silver stitching. Before leaving his office, he had changed his hairpiece to a longish spiky-blond style, since it felt like a “blond” day to him. As always, a fresh hairpiece felt good against his cleanly shaven scalp. Nathans selected a woven straw hat that cast his eyes into shadow, letting him stare with secret interest and curiosity at the other people on the street.
In no hurry, he watched the activity around him, pondering where to go for his walk. People always fascinated him, sometimes infuriated him, but never bored him. He stood under the hum of the smog scrubbers, contemplating, as an Enforcer hovercar moved slowly over the heads of the pedestrian traffic on the street; its black shadow looked like a shark swimming through the crowd.
Nathans stared proudly for a long moment at the massive Resurrection building across the street.
He couldn’t remember if he had thought of that one, or if it was Stromgaard. Probably not Stromgaard—the elder Van Ryman had adequate business sense, and plenty of money to back the formation of Resurrection, Inc., but he just had no … charisma, or the relentless enthusiasm to carry the corporation to its true potential. After seven successful years Nathans had more or less usurped Stromgaard Van Ryman’s position, pacifying the other man by letting him take charge of the new religion they were then forming, the neo-Satanists.
Nathans smiled a little, remembering his glory days, when he had tried to cajole start-up money for the Servant corporation from Stromgaard’s pockets. Nathans had his own fortune, of course, but nobody knew about
He had seen that the technology for reanimating the dead was nearly at hand—biomechanics, bioelectronics, and bio-organics had all developed extensively, but no one had integrated the separate subfields into a direct application. While others spent halfhearted attempts at creating human-style androids, and gave up in despair at the complexity and the cost, Nathans conceived of Servants as a cost-effective alternative.
Medical science had been unable to breach the barrier of death, to bring people back to life. The brain itself proved to be as large a puzzle for the neuro-engineers as the rest of the body had been to the biomechanics. But Nathans never even attempted to bring the mind back to life; he didn’t want to resurrect people—he needed only the strong arms and legs to do work.