"Alastair Reynolds - Signal to Noise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

“I wouldn’t dream of it. Hold my hand, Mick. It’ll make it easier.”

Before he could step back, Andrea closed the distance between
them and took his hand in hers. It was good of her to do that, Mick thought.
He’d been wondering how he would initiate that first touch, and Andrea had
spared him the fumbling awkwardness that would almost certainly have
ensued. That was Andrea to a tee, always thinking of others and trying to
make life a little easier for them, no matter how small the difference. It was
why people liked her so much; why her friends were so fiercely loyal.

“It’s going to be okay, Mick,” Andrea said gently. “Everything that’s
happened between us… it doesn’t matter now. I’ve said bad things to you
and you’ve said bad things to me. But let’s forget about all that. Let’s just
make the most of what time we have.”

“I’m scared of losing you.”

“You’re a good man. You’ve more friends than you realize.”

He was sweating in the heat, so much so that the glasses began to
slip down his nose. The view tilted toward his shoes. He raised his free
hand in a stiff, salutelike gesture and pushed the glasses back into place.

Andrea’s hand tightened on his.
 “I can’t go through with this,” Mick said. “I should go back.”

“You started it,” Andrea said sternly, but without rancor. “Now you
finish it. All the way, Mick Leighton.”

****

TUESDAY
Things were much better by the morning of the second day. When he woke
in Joe Liversedge’s lab there was a fluency in his movements that simply
hadn’t been there the evening before, when he’d said goodbye to Andrea.
He now felt as if he was inhabiting the host body, rather than simply
shuffling it around like a puppet. He still needed the glasses to be able to
see anything, but the nervelink was conveying sensation much more
effectively now, so that when he touched something it came through without
any of the fuzziness or lag he’d been experiencing the day before. Most
tourists were able to achieve reasonable accuracy of touch differentiation
within twenty-four hours. Within two days, their degree of proprioceptive
immersion was generally good enough to allow complex motor tasks such
as cycling, swimming, or skiing. Repeat-visit tourists, especially those that
went back into the same body, got over the transition period even faster. To
them it was like moving back into a house after a short absence.

Joe’s team gave Mick a thorough checkup in the annex. It was all
routine stuff. Amy Flint, Joe’s senior graduate student, insisted on adding
some more numbers to the tactile test database that she was building for