"Ian R. MacLeod - Home Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

as far as the McMurdo Sound and came across a whaler lost amid the penguins and
icebergs far from its normal hunting ground, if those rough and stinking men
would take me aboard, I could visit India in the Raj, Imperial Saint Petersburg,
Venice before the flood. Chat with Marx or Freud, ride through London in a
hansom cab. The whole world--if my very presence didn't cause it to heave into
oblivion--would be mine.

My toes are dying off. I turn back. When I reach the porthole, I remember that
I've tom out my comms wire. A tiny worm of panic bores at my spine. But there's
no need to worry. Janey's seen Woolley through the porthole, and she lets
Woolley in. She and Figgis once again watch the show as this ugly butterfly
strips from her chrysalis out-quit, but by now I can't be bothered to feel any
irritation. We've all got other things on our minds.

It's time for our final Jump up the line. We clamber through the internal hatch
to the communications bay. Figgis is in charge of this aspect of the mission, so
he gets the comfy chair in front of the console while Janey leans her rump
against a mainframe that's so old it bears an IBM logo. I have to stoop
awkwardly under a plastic strut.

Figgis drums his fingers. Janey chews her lips vigorously. Pushing strands of
graying mousy hair back from my face, I wonder what exactly it is that I do that
gets on their nerves. The numbers on the 2D screen tick by in seconds. The
console is a mess of the scribbled stickers that Figgis used to re-label the
original Korean han'gul script. Taped beside it is a postcard of Interlaken
where he took a pre-Epsilon break, blowing what little advance money the College
had been prepared to loan him. The plastic ski runs on the arid mountain slopes
look like spilled rolls of toilet paper.

Jumps are something I can never get used to. This is the fifteenth if you count
the big power surge that first threw us back to 1565 and the vicinity of the
South Pole. From there we've moved up through the years --collecting data and
growing increasingly weary of each other--by a series of smaller Jumps powered
by our own internal batteries. Now at least we're that much closer to home.

Figgis gives up drumming his fingers and begins to stroke his beard, tugging it
as though he's trying to pluck a chicken. The minutes plod by on the screen, and
each one is just like any other. Bus this time of waiting is special with worry.
Jumps involve the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the rotation and the
ever-outward drift of the Galaxy. And then you must add to that the flow of time
itself. What actually happens is that for a dimensionless moment we exist in
several times and places at once, hovering like a mayfly over the waters of
reality as Epsilon calculates exactly where we should land. So far, the system
has worked perfectly....

That's what's happening now. We Jump and the porthole on our right fills with
the soundless buzz of the Jump, which is almost the way the old-fashioned TV
screens used to go between channels, but pushed back to three or possibly four
dimensions. A blizzard without color or sound, a glimpse into the swirling
plughole of the non-universe, a place where there is in fact no light at all,