"Joan D. Vinge - View From A Height" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Joan D)

VIEW FROM A HEIGHT
The race is not always to the swift, nor even to the persistent-it is sometimes won by the reluctant.

JOAN D. VINGE



SATURDAY, THE 7TH

I want to know why those pages were missing.' How am I supposed to keep up with my research if they
leave out pages—?

(Long sighing noise.)

Listen to yourself, Emmylou: You're listening to the sound of fear. It was an oversight, you know that.
Nobody did it to you on purpose. Relax, you're getting Fortnight Fever. Tomorrow you'll get the pages,
and an apology too, if Harvey Weems knows what's good for him.

But still, five whole pages; and the table of contents. How could you miss five pages? And the table of
contents.

How do I know there hasn't been a coup? The Northwest's finally taken over completely, and they're
censoring the media—And like the Man without a Country, everything they send me from now on is
going to have holes cut in it.

In Science?

Or maybe Weems has decided to drive me insane—?

Oh, my God ... it would be a short trip. Look at me. I don't have any fingernails left.

("Arrwk. Hello, beautiful. Hello? Hello?")

("Ozymandias! Get out out of my hair, you devil." Laughter. "Polly want a cracker? Here . . . gently!
That's a boy.")

It's beautiful when he flies. I never get tired of watching him, or looking at him, even after twenty years.
Twenty years. . . . What did the psittacidae do, to win the right to wear a rainbow as their plumage?
Although the way we've hunted them for it, you could say it was a mixed blessing. Like some other
things.

Twenty years. How strange it sounds to hear those words, and know they're true. There are gray hairs
when I look in the mirror. Wrinkles starting. And Weems is bald! Bald as an egg, and all squinty behind
his spectacles. How did we get that way, without noticing it? Time is both longer and shorter than you
think, and usually all at once.

Twelve days is a long time to wait for somebody to return your call. Twenty years is a long time gone.
But 1 feel somehow as though it was only last week that I left home. I keep the circuits clean, going over
them and over them, showing those mental home movies until I could almost step across, sometimes, into
that other reality. But then I always look down, and there's that tremendous abyss full of space and time,