To the Stars -- and Beyond. Damien Broderick

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СКАЧАТЬ reached for their things. The lovers were the first out the door, and the trucker took only as long as it required to drain the dregs of his polymer coffee before heading to his rig. The father watched them leave as he paid for his order with a few small bone coins. Then he walked over to where his son was standing beside the prospector’s empty chair. The young eyes were irised wide as if they could still see the jumbled tibias and femurs, the mandible and the ribs, the ilium, sacrum, radius, ulna, the carpals and metacarpals, the phalanges of the fingers.

      “Did you see it, father?” the youth asked. “Did you?”

      “Yes, son,” he said. “I saw it.

      “A real human skeleton, father. Just like on the viddisks. It was incredible.”

      “Yes it was.”

      “You know, 00101’s father says that there are still bio-humans out there. Is that possible?”

      “No, son. That rumor’s been around a long time, but we hunted down the last bio over twenty years ago now.” He reached out to pull his son close with steel-framed hands that could crush diamonds, but his touch was soft as a silkworm’s tongue. It seemed as if a nova of fizzing electrons had been loosed inside his co-processor, and a quick diagnostic could not tell him what was wrong. He wondered for a moment if it had been a mistake to kill the humans. He wondered….

      * * * *

      The prospector stopped for the night on a hill where he could watch the ribbon-shiny streets of the android town spread out before him.

      At this distance, the swiftly moving transports looked like flowing jewelry, or maybe like the chasing lights his wife used to put up on their Christmas tree every year. He took a chance and built a fire, though it would be dangerously easy to spot. No machine ever needed a campfire to keep itself warm on a cold night. But then, he wasn’t a machine.

      He unhinged the mask and breastplate that hid his identity and dropped them to the ground. His plastisteel boots were next, and he luxuriated in being able to stretch his bare feet out to the flames. The revealed face and revealed feet were both human, though it was strange that there were only three toes on each foot. Or maybe it wasn’t strange. In a world where human bones were the money that could keep a person alive, his toes had been easy to spare.

      ­But that was before­, he thought, as he reached into the saddlebags and drew out the crisp white skull that nestled there. ­Yes­. That was before his wife had died and left him a rich man.

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