"Nebula Awards 2002 - The Nominated Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

It was the sun—as it might look if you were flying through space, directly toward it. It filled the screen until it
seemed you were in imminent danger of crashing right into it.
“Aaaaaaaahh!” Axel screamed with delight.
The sun moved off to the right corner of the screen, as if you were veering away and passing it by. Darkness
again. Another bright speck started to grow in the screen’s center: Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. It was
followed by Venus, then the Earth, and Mars, and Jupiter—all the way through the solar system until a pudgy
oblong bump rolled past odd-wise and all that was left on the screen were hundreds, thousands of bright specks,
changing their positions at differing speeds, as you might see them if you were flying through space.
“Yeah!” cried Axel. “Yeah!!”
Through the haze of the Oort Cloud, then out past the solar system, the stars kept coming and coming until you
could make out a bright little smudge, like a smeared thumbprint in luminous paint.
It was a galaxy! Another galaxy!
“Yeah!” shouted Axel. “Yeah yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah YEAH!”
The galaxy grew in size until you could just about make out some of the more individuated members of the star
cluster. Axel cheered them on.
“Yes! Galaxies! Let’s go!”
The screensaver cycle was over and it was back to the beginning: the little speck grows into the sun, then the
planets, then the far off galaxy—
Axel watched it all again, and then one more time before Reggie interrupted his reverie.
“There was something else you wished Reggie to do?”
“Ohhhh. That’s-right that’s-right that’s-right!” Axel kept his eyes on the moving stars. He remembered someone
from the dream he’d had during his brief sleep: he couldn’t remember who, but it was someone he wanted to talk to.
“I gotta send a message!”
“And where do you wish to send the message?”
Still looking at the screensaver, he said, “To space!”
Reggie took an instant longer than usual to reply. “Space, as an address, is not very specific. Are there any
particular coordinates in space to which you wish your message directed?”
“What are coordinates?” Axel kept looking at the stars.
The screensaver blinked away. In its place appeared numbers from top to bottom: numbers with decimal points
and superscripted degree signs—
“Coordinates,” Reggie said, “are a way to divide space by increments, so that one can more accurately determine
which part of space one is looking at or to which section one might want to direct a message.”
“Ohhhhh.”
Reggie scrolled the numbers upward. Axel gaped at them, partly perplexed at the notion of numbers as
directions, partly in awe at the sheer volume of them. Numbers, decimal points, degree signs—space was
threatening to become an impenetrable wall of numbers. If he thought about it any more his head would heat up
and explode.
“That one!” Axel pointed with his left forepaw. “I’ll take that one!”
The numbers stopped scrolling. “Which one?” asked Reggie.
“That one!” He pressed the forepaw to the glass screen, then tapped against it adamantly.
The numbers were so small—and his forepaw so big in comparison—that Reggie could still not discern which
coordinate Axel had chosen. Reggie highlighted one of the numbers in bright red.
“This one?”
“Yeah! That’s it!” In truth it wasn’t. But the red highlighting was distracting to Axel, whose choice of number was
already purely arbitrary. Facing a wall of numbers, one seemed as good as another. “Send it there!”
“What kind of message?” Reggie asked. “Vocal? Alphabetical characters? Equations?”
“Like, maybe radio,” Axel said. “Or whatever you’ve got that’s faster, like micro-tachy-tot waves, or
super-hydro-electro-neutrinos.”
“One moment,” said Reggie. “At what frequency?”
“Frequency? Just once is okay.” He rubbed a little spot just under his jaw.