"Robert Reed - Down the Bright Way" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

DOWN THE BRIGHT WAY

By ROBERT REED




It took me years to discover that science, with all its brilliance, lights only a
middle chapter of creation, a chapter with both ends bordering on the infinite, one which
can be expanded but never completed.
—Charles Lindbergh



BOOK ONE

LINCOLN



KYLE

1

Sometimes, when I am tired and distracted, I forget—showing my
 age, perhaps?—and I consider my colleagues as if for the first time. They
are Wanderers, authentic human beings, yet they come with many faces
and no two have the same precise color and shape. Each of our species has
its own talents and its own distinct intelligence and I have to marvel at
them; I couldn’t imagine such a multitude if I tried. All of us began as the
same upright primate, roaming tropical savannas on a million identical
earths, and look at us now. We have so many ways of living, and so many
colors of thought . . . !
Revelations like these can fill me with such joy.
Yet sometimes, at damnably unpredictable moments, that joy
dissolves into a sudden chill. A blackness is within me, for no reason
whatsoever, and I start to shiver . . . and quietly moan.
—Jy’s private journal

The first sample of any new earth is a small volume of common
seawater. Its isotope ratios and dissolved gases are studied, radioactive
traces are identified, and a tentative profile of the new earth is compiled.
Then if the sample is relatively free of toxins, each scout, according to
tradition, wets a finger and places it on the tongue, tasting salts as well as
the bitterest planktons.
—A scout’s chronicles


She didn’t play fair, Kyle was thinking. Just like a woman, he was thinking. It
was two, maybe two-thirty in the morning, and they lay on his bed with the sheets