"Julian May - Jack the Bodiless" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian) file:///F|/rah/Julian%20May/May,%20Julian%20-%2...ic%20Milieu%201%20-%20Jack%20the%20Bodiless.txt (3 of 207) [1/15/03 7:34:12 PM]
file:///F|/rah/Julian%20May/May,%20Julian%20-%20Galactic%20Milieu%201%20-%20Jack%20the%20Bodiless.txt wear an environmental suit? "For sissies! I been skiing my brains out for a hundred fifty years in this outfit and I haven't froze my bizoune off yet. You'll notice that my wrist-com's modern enough. Keeps me alerted to weather changes. And if I get snowed in or come a cropper or even run outa coffee or munchies, the Ski Patrol or a robot monitor'll home in on its transponder-locator and take care of me. I knew this storm was on the way. I figure to spend the night here, then call for a shuttlebug to fly me back to the park lodge tomorrow if she don't blow out as per forecast. Wouldn't mind at all spending the last week of my vacation lolling around in style—" I'm sorry, Uncle Rogi. I've come to collect you. "I'm booked for seven more days, dammit!" You are well rested and quite able to begin work on your Memoirs again—as am I. Take your time finishing your meal, but tonight you'll sleep in your own bed back home in New Hampshire. "Back to Earth tonight—? That'll mean hopping the hype at maximum displacement factor. I'll be a nervous wreck!" I'll take you myself . . . more gently. Rogi's eyes narrowed and he squinted at the portion of air from which his invisible companion's thoughts appeared to emanate. "So! You Lylmik do have a mitigator for the pain of hyperspatial translation—just like Ti-Jean always said you did." Yes. Jack was perceptive as always. But the device is not yet appropriate for general use among our client races in the Galactic Milieu. You will make no mention of it. Rogi spooned down chili and drank coffee. "I wouldn't dream of violating the glorious Lylmik master scheme . . . But what's the damn rush to get me humping again on the Memoirs?" Rogi rolled his eyes hopelessly. Then for some time he ate in silence, his mind idly recapitulating the things he had already written and shuffling through what would come next, in the period following the Great Intervention. "Gonna take another book, big as the last one, to cover the thirty-eight years of the Simbiari Proctorship. Be a pain in the ass for me to get all those family shenanigans sorted out, too." Unifex said: I want you to skip over most of that and begin immediately on Jack's early life and disincarnation, and the growing threat of human opposition to Galactic citizenship. Then you will describe Dorothea's part in the earlier drama, and finish up with your view of the Metapsychic Rebellion, making a Milieu Trilogy. The events of the painful Proctorship years, the time before the Human Polity was admitted to the Galactic Concilium, have been covered well enough by Philip and Lucille in their own autobiographies. But they never knew Jack's full story, or Diamond's— "Or yours, mon cher fantome." Or mine. "I'll have to backtrack some to make it hang together, you know. Start out with a kind of retrospective digression. And I'll still need a lot of fill-in help from you to give a proper overall picture." I realize that. "Is that why—" Rogi paused. He swallowed hard, banishing a certain thought before it could be formulated, even subvocally. "Eh bien, mon fils. I reckon you know what you're doing by now." Beyond a doubt. To paraphrase one of your favorite fantasy writers, even the most modest intellect can hardly help learning a thing or two after six million years. The old man grinned with forced cheerfulness at the vaporous air. "Six million . . . Ah, those self-rejuvenating Remillard genes! A real drag, immortality, eh? Not that I'm ready to knock |
|
© 2026 Библиотека RealLib.org
(support [a t] reallib.org) |