"David Brin - The Crystal Spheres" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

We had just finished a visit to the once-sunken ruins of Atlantis, and were hiking out
on a forest trail under the evening glow of the ringcity high overhead. In the centuries
since I had last deepslept, the gleaming, flexisolid belt of habitindustry around our
world had grown. In the middle latitudes, night was now a pale thing. Nearer the
equator, there was little to distinguish it from day, so glorious was the lightribbon in
the sky.
Not that night could ever be the same as it had been when my grandfather was a
child, even if every work of man were removed. For ever since the twenty-second
century there had been the Shards, casting colors out where once there had been but
galaxies and stars.
No wonder no one had objected to the banishment of night from Earthsurface.
Humanity out on the smallbodies might have to look upon the Shards, but
Earthdwellers had no particular desire to gaze out upon those unpleasant reminders.
Being only a year thawed, I wasn't ready yet to even ask what century it was, let
alone begin finding some passable profession for this life. Reawakened sleepers
were generally given a decade or so to enjoy and explore the differences that had
grown in the Earth and in the solar system before having to make any choices.
This was especially true in deepspacers like me. The State--more ageless than
any of its nearly immortal members--had a nostalgic affection for us strange ones,
officers of a near-extinct service. When a deepspacer awakened, he or she was
encouraged to go about the altered Terra without interference, seeking strangeness.
He might even dream he was exploring another goodworld, where no man had ever
trod, instead of breathing the same air that had been in his own lungs so many times,
during so many ages past.
I had expected to go my rebirthtrek unbothered. So it was with amazement, that
evening on the forestflank of Sicily, that I saw a creamy-colored Sol-Gov flivver
drop out of a bank of lacy clouds and drift toward the campsite, where my group of
timecast wanderers had settled to doze and aimlessly gossip about the events of the
day.
We all stood and watched it come. The other campers looked at one another
suspiciously as the flivver fell toward us. They wondered who was important enough
to compel the ever-polite Worldcomps to break into our privacy, sending this
teardrop down below the Palermo heights to parklands where it didn't belong.
I kept my secret feeling to myself. The thing had come for me. I knew it. Don't
ask me how. A deepspacer knows things. That is all.
We who have been out beyond the shattered Shards of Sol's broken
crystalsphere, and have peered from the outside to see living worlds within faraway
shells... We are the ones who have pressed our faces against the glass at the candy
store, staring in at what we could not have. We are the ones who understand the
depth of our deprivation, and the joke the Universe has played on us.
The billions of our fellow humans--those who have never left Sol's soft, yellow
kindness--need psychists even to tell of the irreparable trauma they endure. Most
people drift through their lives suffering only occasional bouts of greatdepression,
easily treated, or ended with finalsleep.
But we deepspacers have rattled the bars of our cage. We know our neuroses
arise out of the Universe's great jest.
I stepped forward toward the clearing where the Sol-Gov flivver was settling. It
gave my campmates someone to blame for the interruption. I could feel their burning
stares.
The beige teardrop opened, and out stepped a tall woman. She possessed a type