"Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

chair. The apparition was more realistic than any hologram -- even down to subtle shadowing
effects -- since it was being generated by direct manipulation of Sylveste's visual field. The beta-
level simulation represented Calvin the way fame best remembered him, as he had been when he
was barely fifty years old, in his heyday on Yellowstone. Strangely, he looked older than Sylveste,
even though the image of Calvin was twenty years younger in physiological terms. Sylveste was
eight years into his third century, but the longevity treatments he had received on Yellowstone had
been more advanced than any available in Calvin's time.
Other than that, their features and build were the same, both of them possessing a permanent
amused curve to the lips. Calvin wore his hair shorter and was dressed in Demarchist Belle Epoque
finery, rather than the relative austerity of Sylveste's expeditionary dress: billowing frock shirt and
elegantly chequered trousers hooked into buccaneer-boots, his fingers aglint with jewels and metal.
His impeccably shaped beard was little more than a rust-coloured delineation along the line of his
jaw. Small entoptics surrounded his seated figure, symbols of Boolean and three-valued logics and
long cascades of binary. One hand fingered the bristles beneath his chin, while the other toyed with
the carved scroll that ended the seat's armrest.
A wave of animation slithered over the projection, the pale eyes gaining a glisten of interest.
Calvin raised his fingers in lazy acknowledgement. 'So...' he said. 'The shit's about to match
coordinates with the fan.'
'You presume a lot.'
'No need to presume anything, dear boy. I just tapped into the net and accessed the last few
thousand news reports.' He craned his neck to survey the stateroom. 'Nice pad you've got here. How
are the eyes, by the way?'
'They're functioning as well as can be expected.'
Calvin nodded. 'Resolution's not up to much, but that was the best I could do with the tools I was
forced to work with. I probably only reconnected forty per cent of your optic nerve channels, so
putting in better cameras would have been pointless. Now if you had halfway decent surgical
equipment lying around on this planet, I could perhaps begin to do something. But you wouldn't
give Michelangelo a toothbrush and expect a great Sistine Chapel.'
'Rub it in.'
'I wouldn't dream of it,' Calvin said, all innocence. 'I'm just saying that if you had to let her take
the Lorean, couldn't you at least have persuaded Alicia to leave us some medical equipment?'
His wife had led the mutiny against him twenty years earlier; a fact Calvin never allowed
Sylveste to forget.
'So I made a kind of self-sacrifice.' Sylveste waved an arm to silence the image. 'Sorry, but I
didn't invoke you for a fireside chat, Cal.'
'I do wish you'd call me Father.'
Sylveste ignored him. 'Do you know where we are?'
'A dig, I presume.' Calvin closed his eyes briefly and touched his fingers against his temples,
affecting concentration. 'Yes. Let me see. Two expeditionary crawlers out of Mantell, near the Ptero
Steppes... a Wheeler grid... how inordinately quaint! Though I suppose it suits your purpose well
enough. And what's this? High-res gravitometer sections... seismograms... you've actually found
something, haven't you?'
At that moment the escritoire popped up a status fairy to tell him there was an incoming call from
Mantell. Sylveste held a hand up to Calvin while he debated whether or not to accept the call. The
person trying to reach him was Henry Janequin, a specialist in avian biology and one of Sylveste's
few outright allies. But while Janequin had known the real Calvin, Sylveste was fairly sure he had
never seen Calvin's beta-level... and most certainly not in the process of being solicited for advice
by his son. The admission that he needed Cal's help -- that he had even considered invoking the sim
for this purpose -- could be a crucial sign of weakness.
'What are you waiting for?' Cal said. 'Put him on.'