"Simon R. Green - Nightside 5 - Paths Not Taken" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Simon R)

surprised to see the streets cringe away from me. People, and others, were giving me even more room
than usual. Either the news about my mother's identity was already getting around, or they'd heard that
the Authorities had finally declared open season on me, and no-one wanted to be too close when the
hammer came down.

The night sky was brilliant with stars, laid out in constellations never seen outside the Nightside, while the
full moon was a dozen times larger than most people are used to. The air was hot and sweaty like a fever
room, and all around gaudy neon blazed come-ons for every kind of sin

and temptation. Music drifted out the propped-open doors of every kind of club, from the slow moaning
of saxophones to the very latest throbbing bass beats. Crowds surged up and down the pavement, faces
alight at the prospect of getting their hands on something they weren't supposed to. Pleasures, and other
things, that the outside world would never approve of. It was three o'clock in the morning, just like
always, and the Nightside was jumping.

Dreams and damnations at marked-down prices, and a little shop-soiled.

I was on my way to visit my office. I'd never been there before, and was quite looking forward to seeing
what it looked like. My teenage secretary Cathy (she adopted me after I rescued her from a house that
tried to eat her, and no, I didn't get a say in the matter) set up the office for me after I came into some
serious money. (I tracked down the Unholy Grail for the Pope. I also started an angel war in the process,
but that's the Nightside for you.) Cathy ran my office and my business with frightening efficiency, and I
was happy to let her do it. Being organised has always been an alien concept to me, along with regular
exercise, clearing up after myself, and remembering to do the laundry.

But this night I was considering a course of action that was dangerous in a whole bunch of ways that
were new even to me, and I felt the need for some serious research and advice. If I was going to get at
the truth about who and what my mother really was, I was going to have to go back through Time, to the
very beginnings of the Nightside, more than two thousand years ago. And that meant talking to Old
Father Time, that immortal incarnation who was scarier and far more powerful and more dangerous than
I would ever be.

Still, forewarned was hopefully fore-armed, and I had some truly powerful computers on my side. They
were supposed to be Artificial Intelligences from some potential future, on the run from something they
preferred not to talk

about. Cathy picked them up in a really good deal, the details of which she preferred not to discuss.
Business as usual, in the Nightside. The AIs put up with being owned and used because they were
datavores, information junkies, and they'd never seen anything like the Nightside.

Time travel, up and down the line, was a common enough occurrence in the Nightside, but far too
arbitrary to do anyone any good. Timeslips could spring up anywhere, without warning, offering brief
access to the past or any number of potential futures. No-one knew how or why Timeslips operated,
though down the years people had come up with some really disturbing theories. All the Authorities ever
did was set up barriers and warning signs around the affected areas and wait for the Timeslips to
disappear again. There was a Really Dangerous Sports Club, whose members would come running from
all directions to dive into a Timeslip, just for the thrill of it. Danger junkies, for whom the thrill of setting
themselves on fire and jumping off high buildings just didn't do it for them any more. They must like what
they find at the other end of their rainbow, because none of them ever come back to complain.