Fall or, Dodge in Hell. Neal Stephenson

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СКАЧАТЬ stuff—like clothing—is down here.”

      It seemed on one level like the opening scene of a horror movie in which Corvallis would never make it out of the basement, but having got this far, he followed her down. She took the stairs at a good pace but with certain precautions, one hand on each banister, pitching from side to side a bit more than a person with normal legs, and through her silver spandex garment he could see her back muscles and her triceps working. They reached the concrete floor of the basement, which seemed to have been poured by various drunk or indifferent people on different occasions. Light poured in from windows high in the walls, so she felt no need to turn the lights on. “Watch your step,” she admonished him, which he found curiously touching given that he had legs and feet.

      Cardboard boxes of different sizes and vintages had been stacked around the place according to some scheme that wasn’t obvious to him. Some of these were open. They were full of T-shirts, not folded, but thrown in willy-nilly. Most of these were printed with Canyonland Adventures logos, or other tourist-related insignia having to do with Moab, Utah, or the Colorado River. In one corner a rug had been laid out on the floor. On it was a huge pile of shirts all mixed up. The place had the clean smell of new textiles.

      “What’s Sthetix?” Corvallis asked, holding up a black T-shirt with a completely different sort of logo—not in any way, shape, or form touristy.

      “My dead company. See, if you take ‘prosthetics’ or ‘aesthetics’ and chop off the first bit …”

      “Got it.”

      “It’s from a Greek word meaning ‘strength,’” she insisted, as if he had been disputing it. “‘Prosthetics’ means ‘to add strength.’”

      He nodded. “Cool! It’s a cool name.”

      She held the compliment at arm’s length for a moment, then slapped it away. “Hard to pronounce. Every. Single. Fucking. Conversation we had was about how to say it, or how to spell it.”

      “It’s a good code name,” he said. “When you’re ready to go to market you hire a naming company to come up with a crowd-pleaser.” This appeared to settle her down. “Can I have one of these?” he asked, holding up a Sthetix shirt.

      “Why?”

      He thought better of explaining to Maeve that collecting swag from obscure, dead companies was a tech industry fetish.

      “I like the name, and what it means. And it’s a memento of this day.”

      She snorted. “The day Moab got nuked?”

      He said nothing for a moment, intimidated by her sardonic force. Everything felt awkward. There was a sense of being on a perfectly good road in a perfectly sound car that was, however, veering into a ditch.

      A thing happened where he simultaneously channeled both Forthrasts, Richard and Zula. “No,” he said, hearing his own voice strangely through blood-engorged ears. “The day I rode in the back of a truck with you.”

      She actually took a step back, and raised her eyebrows. “You can have one. Make sure it fits.”

      “Okay. No peeking.” He pulled his tunic up over his head and tossed it aside.

      “Fair’s fair,” she returned. He heard a clank and a thud followed by a hissing, slithering sound. He turned just in time to see her peeling her sun shirt off. This had necessitated shrugging off her red suspenders, so her cargo shorts had impacted the pavement a moment earlier. Now she was down to a garment that he identified, vaguely, as a sports bra, and a pair of granny panties.

      “Oh, excuse me,” he blurted.

      “You looked?” she returned, mock outraged. “It’s all right. Nothing you wouldn’t see at the beach, right?”

      He had turned his back on her and was pretending to sort through T-shirts. “Still … I didn’t mean to.”

      He could hear bionic footsteps. “Would you like me to help you with that?”

      “I’m good, thanks.”

      She came up very close behind him, reached around his body, and plucked out a T-shirt. “You’d look smashing in this. Turn around and we’ll check the size.”

      He turned to face her. She held the shirt up in front of him, pinning it against his shoulders with her thumbs, and looked him up and down. “It’s not long enough to hide your doodle,” she observed.

      He made a reasonable guess as to the meaning of the term. “Doodle containment’s an issue,” he admitted, “with boxers.”

      “One of these containers has some Sthetix men’s briefs,” she said. “Nice and tight.” She pulled the shirt away and tossed it into the box.

      They stood there for a few moments looking at each other from rather close. When she’d pulled the hood off, her hair had come loose and tumbled messily down her back. A bit of gentle tugging and head-shaking would have worked wonders, but she didn’t give a shit.

      Corvallis reached out slowly and put his hands on her hips.

      “After my friend died,” he said, “and I got over the shock, you know what happened? Like, around the time of the funeral?”

      “You got inappropriately horny and felt like fucking everything that moved?”

      “Yeah, has that ever happened to you?”

      “Yeah. When my dad died. When my company died. And now,” she said. “Even though no one died in this case.” She took a step forward, leaving maybe a quarter of an inch of clearance between her belly and the tip of his boxer-tented doodle. “It comes from thinking about mortality, right? Leads to a ‘life is short—let’s go’ mentality.”

      He pulled her into him and mashed his doodle, bolt upright, against her stomach. She wrapped her arms around his neck for purchase and mashed back. They went on to perform sexual intercourse on the big pile of T-shirts on the rug. These could be grabbed in bunches and wadded up and jammed under body parts to facilitate various positions. She wasn’t talking much, but he got the idea that she wanted to be able to touch herself while also looking him in the face. Fair enough. They found a way to make it happen by what would have been described, in a PowerPoint presentation, as agile deployment to leverage the T-shirts’ structural modularity. He came first, perhaps inevitably given that he hadn’t had sex with anyone in three years. But he stayed in while she finished up, staring at him the whole time through half-closed eyes.

      Somewhat later, at her suggestion, he gave her a piggyback ride up the stairs to the bathroom and deposited her in the shower stall, then went back and fetched her legs. While she showered, he attempted to clean up. As if blindly following its sole imperative, his semen had ended up all over the place, distributing itself over the maximum conceivable number of T-shirts as well as locations on the rug. There was a washing machine in the corner of the basement; he stuffed it full. He started the machine and, through the white noise of the plumbing above, heard Maeve denouncing him as some kind of fucker or other. He switched the cycle to cold.

      For a while now, the part of Corvallis that was a responsible executive had, as it were, been bound and gagged in a closet, trying to get his attention by banging his forehead on the floor in Morse code. Considering what the rest of him had been up to, СКАЧАТЬ