"James Patrick Kelly - The Edge of Nowhere" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

"Shelly Castorp thinks she's planting daffodils with this." Chance shook his head. "I told her that the
handles of garden tools were always made of wood but she claims her father had a shovel just like that
one." He shook his head. "The specific gravity of steel is 7.80 grams per cubic centimeter, you know."

"Oh?" When Rain let the handle go, the shovel clanged against the cement floor. "Can we grow
daffodils?"

"We'll see." Chance muscled the shovel back into place on its pallet. He probably didn't appreciate her
handling other people's orders. "I'm racking my brains trying to remember if I've got something here for
you. But I don't, do I?"

"How about those binoculars I keep asking for?"

"I send the requests ...." He spread his hands. "They all bounce." The corners of his mouth twitched. "So
is this about us? At long last?"

"I'm just looking for a book, Chance. A novel."
"Oh," he said, crestfallen. "Better come to the office."

Normally if Rain wanted to add a book to the Very Memorial Library, she'd call Chance and put in an
order. Retrieving books was usually no problem for the collective intelligence of humanity, which had
uploaded itself into the cognisphere sometime in the late Twenty-third Century. All it needed was an
author and title. Failing that, a plot description or even just a memorable line might suffice for the
cognisphere to perform a plausible, if not completely accurate, reconstruction of some lost text. In fact,
depending on the quality of the description, the cognisphere would recreate a version of pretty much
anything the citizens of Nowhere could remember from the world.

Exactly how it accomplished this, and more important, why it bothered, was a mystery.

Chance's office was tucked into the rear of the Barrow, next to the creche. On the way, they passed the
Big Board of the MemEx, which tracked audience and storyteller accounts for all the residents of
Nowhere and sorted and cataloged the accumulated memories. Chance stopped by the crèche to check
the vitals of Rahim Aziz, who was destined to become the newest citizen of Nowhere, thus bringing the
population back up to the standard 853. Rahim was to be an elderly man with a crown of snowy white
hair surrounding an oval bald spot. He was replacing Lucy Panza, the pro and Town Calligrapher, who
had gone missing two weeks ago and was presumed to have thrown herself over the edge without telling
anyone.

"Old Aziz isn't quite as easy on the eye as you were," said Chance, who never failed to remind Rain that
he had seen her naked during her revival. Rahim floated on his back in a clear tube filled with a yellow,
serous fluid. He had a bit of a paunch and the skin of his legs and under his arms was wrinkled. Rain
noted with distaste that he had a penis tattoo of an elephant.

"When will you decant him?"

Chance rubbed a thumb across a readout shells built into the wall of the crèche. "Tomorrow, maybe."
The shells meant nothing to Rain. "Tuesday at the latest."

Chance Conrad's office was not so much decorated as overstuffed. Dolls and crystal and tools and
fossils and clocks jostled across shelves and the tops of cabinets and chests. The walls were covered