"Justina Robson - Natural History" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robson Justina)

crisis of suicidal beauty, fuck it. And in another few seconds it would be over, one way or another.

Did you write the book of love?

She’d had only two femtoseconds to realize that no diversion she could make was going to steer her
clear of the ring of crap that had suddenly manifested itself. This shit hadn’t appeared in her awareness
until the last moment, due to a lack of light in this star-forsaken region. That, combined with a lack of
expectation in her mind and her overconfidence in her own ultra-high-resolution optics and the data from
the fixed solar scanners back home. No telescope had reported any big dusts, so she’d assumed there
weren’t any. Isol could process memories at fifty times the speed of an Unevolved human and have it feel
like real time; but she couldn’t think of what to do when she saw the problem, and by then it had been
too late. Two femtoseconds wasn’t even enough for the brain to make the first connection towards
starting a gasp - if you had lungs.

A long, long time ago, when she was little, she’d danced in a field of poppies listening to ‘American Pie’,
not understanding a single word, around her the world as wide as a blue sky could stretch. The track had
lasted half a second in those days, played as fast as she could comprehend it at the time - thinking she
was some kind of genius as she dashed through one era of music after another. ‘American Pie’ and its
mystery had lasted time enough for one sharp intake of breath.

These days she could play her music at far greater speeds without losing any nuance; Earth’s entire
repertoire took only two years to listen to, end to end - more than enough time to find favourites and
make lists and endless recombinations of accompaniment to the cacophony of the universal radio.

Now she played it slower than that, one line for every second. It seemed important as never before to
understand it, reviewing and discarding all the billions of databased papers already written on its lyrics in
order to find her own unique take on its perfect capture of the ineffable. She wanted to hear it so loud
that the sound of her own death wouldn’t eclipse it.

Do you have faith in God above?

She saw the curve of her future suddenly start to veer into the cubic… the quartic… heading into its
visible limit. It was too late, and it had been too late since the first day of her life when, as an extra-solar
explorer, she’d been set on a track for speed and silence and the infinite depths of an ocean beyond all
vastness. Even a Forged life is so short and this place is so very big. How could you stand to be late?

Do you believe in rock and roll ?

A rock - much bigger than the rest - smashed through her right sailfin, punching a hole in it more than half
a metre across. Numbness began to creep into her side. From the edges of the wound hydrocarbons and
silicates bled out into a whitening tail behind her.

Suddenly, as if the lump had left a secret decoder in its violent passage, Isol understood the song, even
the line about the levee, although she didn’t know what a levee was. (Her insentient memory supplied
some kind of ditch full of water runoff from green fields and a river, sodden with rain to bursting point.) It
told her the song was about the death of Buddy Holly and the crash of his plane. But she knew it was for
her, because she was the plane and the passenger and the song and the words, and the father, son and
holy ghost were out beyond the light horizon.

Can music save your mortal soul?