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

following week. The link would become noise-swamped around teatime on
Sunday, give or take three hours either way.

If only they’d started sooner, Mick thought. But Joe had done all that
he could.

Today—despite the foreboding message from the lab—his sense of
immersion in the counterpart world had become total. As the sunlit city
swept by outside the tram’s windows, Mick found it nearly impossible to
believe that he was not physically present in this body, rather than lying on
the couch in the other version of the lab. Overnight his tactile immersion
had improved markedly. When he braced himself against the tram’s upright
handrail, as it swept around a curve, he felt cold aluminum, the faint
greasiness where it had been touched by other hands.

At the offices, Andrea’s colleagues greeted him with an unforced
casualness that left him dismayed. He’d been expecting awkward
expressions of sympathy, sly glances when they thought he wasn’t looking.
Instead he was plonked down in the waiting area and left to flick through
glossy brochures while he waited for Andrea to emerge from her office. No
one even offered him a drink.

He leafed through the brochures dispiritedly. Andrea’s job had always
been a sore point in their relationship. If Mick didn’t approve of nervelinking,
he had even less time for the legal vultures that made so much money out
of personal injury claims related to the technology. But now he found it
difficult to summon his usual sense of moral superiority. Unpleasant things
had happened to decent people because of negligence and corner-cutting.
If nervelinking was to be a part of the world, then someone had to make
sure the victims got their due. He wondered why this had never been clear
to him before.

“Hiya,” Andrea said, leaning over him. She gave him a businesslike
kiss, not quite meeting his mouth. “Took a bit longer than I thought, sorry.”

“Can we go now?” Mick asked, putting down the brochure.

“Yep, I’m done here.”

Outside, when they were walking along the pavement in the shade of
the tall, commercial buildings, Mick said: “They didn’t have a clue, did they?
No one in that office knows what’s happened to us.”

“I thought it was best,” Andrea said.

“I don’t know how you can keep up that act, that nothing’s wrong.”

“Mick, nothing is wrong. You have to see it from my point of view. I
haven’t lost my husband. Nothing’s changed for me. When you’re
gone—when all this ends, and I get the other you back—my life carries on