"Diana Wynne Jones - The Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

dreary without the background hum of the computers and the
constant ringing or beeping of all the phones. So as soon as
Grandma’s bedroom door shut, Hayley raced softly downstairs to
the computer room.
Grandad was there, sitting massively in front of a screen,
carefully following something on it with a light-pen. Hayley tiptoed
up to look over his shoulder. It was a picture of Earth, slowly
spinning in dark blue emptiness. She saw Africa rotating past as
she arrived. But Africa was quite hard to see because it, and the
whole globe, was swathed in a soft, multicoloured mist. The mist
seemed to be made up of thousands of tiny pale threads, all of them
moving and swirling outwards. Each thread shone as it moved,
gentle and pearly, so the effect was as if Earth spun in a luminous
rainbow veil. While Hayley watched, some of the threads wrapped
themselves together into a shining skein, and this grew on
outwards, growing brighter and harder looking as it grew, and then
got thrown gently sideways with the turning of the world, so that it
became a silver red spiral. There were dozens of these skeins, when
Hayley looked closely, in dozens of silvery colours. But underneath
these were thousands of other shining threads which busily drifted
and wove and plaited close to Earth.
“That’s beautiful !” Hayley said. “What are they?”
“Are your hands clean?” Grandad answered absently. His
light-pen steadily picked out a gold gleaming set of threads
underneath the spirals and followed it in and out, here and there,
through the gauzy mass. He seemed to take it for granted that
Hayley had washed her hands, because he went on, “This is the
mythosphere. It’s made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs,
legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth. As you
can see, it’s constantly growing and moving as people invent new
tales to tell or find new things to believe. The older strands move
out to become these spirals, where things tend to become quite
crude and dangerous. They’ve hardened off, you see.”
“Are they real, the same as atoms and planets?” Hayley asked.
 “Quite as real—even realer in some ways,” Grandad replied.
Hayley said the name of it to herself, in order not to forget it.
“The mythosphere. And what are you doing with it?”
“Tracing the golden apples,” Grandad said. “Wondering why
they’ve never become a spiral of their own. They mix into other
strands all the time. Look.” He did something to the keyboard to
make Earth turn about and spread itself into a flat plain with
continents slowly twirling across it. Golden threads rose from India,
from the flatness north of the mountains, from the Mediterranean,
and from Sweden, Norway, and Britain. “See here.” Grandad’s big
hairy hand pointed the light-pen this way and that as the threads
arose. “This thread mingles with three different dragon stories. And
this” —the line of light moved southward— “mixes with two quite
different stories here. This one’s the judgement of Paris and here
we have Atalanta—the girl who was distracted from winning a race
by some golden apples. And there are hundreds of folktales—” The