"Duane, Diane - Tos - Spock's World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

Meier, for their help in getting this book in on time.
Thanks also to Susie and Mike, who helped in
the pinch . . .
and to Dave Stern, who could teach a Vulcan a
few things about calm.
And lastly, thanks to Mr. James Hunted
Blair and the people of Blairquhan Castle,
Scotland, where much of this novel was conceived. Their
hospitality and understanding made it all possible . .
. and is much appreciated.
The joke in Starfleet is that the only thing that can
travel faster than warp 10 is news. Of the many
jokes told in Starfleet, this one at least seems
true. For a Federation of hundreds of planets,
spread sparse as comet-tail dust over thousands of
light-years, news is lifeblood: without it, every
world is as alone as if there was no other life,
no other thought but its own. Few planets, these
days, are so reclusive or paranoid as to want
to be all alone in the dark, and thus the passage of
news has covert priority even over the waging of
wars and the making of fortunes. By subspace
transmission (faster than warpspeeds, but not fleet
enough), by pumped-phaser tachyon packet and shunt
squirt, by compressed-continuum "sidestep"
technology and sine avoidance, and (within solar
systems) by broadcast carrier of all the kinds from
radio through holotrans, the news of the many planets
of the Federation and of planets outside it slides its
way through and around and under and past the billions of
miles and thousands of lightyears.

The terrible distances take their toll of the passedon
word. Signals are corrupted by subspace
noise, data is dropped out, translations are
dubious or ambivalent: distance makes some
pieces of news seem less urgent than they should,
proximity makes other happenings seem more dire
than they are. But no news passes unchanged, either
by the silent spaces; or the noisy minds that cannot
seem to live without it: and no news affects any
two of those minds the same way. This piece
of news was no exception.
The door vanished, arid the man walked into his
rooms and stood still for a moment, then said the word that
brought the door back behind him and shut all other
sounds outside. His terminal was chiming softly, a
sound that most people on the planet where he now lived could
not have heard: it was pitched too high. The man
paused long enough to slip his dark cloak off and hang