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

rather than making the most of the experience as it happened to him. That
had always been his problem, ever since he was a kid. School holidays had
always been steeped in a melancholic sense of how few days were left.

But this wasn’t a holiday.

After a while, he noticed that some people had gathered at the bow of
the boat, pressing against the railings. They were pointing up, into the sky.
Some of them had pulled out phones.

“There’s something going on,” Mick said.

“I can see it,” Andrea answered. She touched the side of his face,
steering his view until he was craning up as far as his neck would allow. “It’s
an airplane.”

Mick waited until the glasses picked out the tiny, moving speck of the
plane etching a pale contrail in its wake. He felt a twinge of resentment
toward anyone still having the freedom to fly, when the rest of humanity was
denied that right. It had been a nice dream when it lasted, flying. He had no
idea what political or military purpose the plane was serving, but it would be
an easy matter to find out, were he that interested. The news would be in all
the papers by the afternoon. The plane wouldn’t just be overflying this
version of Cardiff, but his as well. That had been one of the hardest things
to take since Andrea’s death. The world at large steamrolled on, its course
undeflected by that single human tragedy. Andrea had died in the accident
in his world, she’d survived unscathed in this one, and that plane’s course
wouldn’t have changed in any measurable way (in either reality).

“I love seeing airplanes,” Andrea said. “It reminds me of what things
were like before the moratorium. Don’t you?”

“Actually,” Mick said, “they make me a bit sad.”
 ****

WEDNESDAY
Mick knew how busy Andrea had been lately, and he tried to persuade her
against taking any time off from her work. Andrea had protested, saying her
colleagues could handle her workload for a few days. Mick knew better than
that—Andrea practically ran the firm single-handedly—but in the end they’d
come to a compromise. Andrea would take time off from the office, but
she’d pop in first thing in the morning to put out any really serious fires.

Mick agreed to meet her at the offices at ten, after his round of tests.
Everything still felt the way it had the day before; if anything he was even
more fluent in his body movements. But when Joe had finished, the news
was all that Mick had been quietly dreading, while knowing it could be no
other way. The quality of the link had continued to degrade. According to
Joe they were down to one point eight megs now. They’d seen enough
decay curves to be able to extrapolate forward into the beginning of the