"Peter F. Hamilton - Misspent youth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

'Magic?' Her smile widened. 'I would have thought a clever boy

like you could have worked this out by now.'

'How? I don't know any spells.'

The woman laughed. 'Spells? Well, I don't know about that.
We just put a little fountain pump below the bowl, and squirt a
jet into the tap. Takes an age to set it up just right.'

Timothy stared resentfully at the treacherous fountain. He
couldn't even look at the woman - she must think him the
stupidest boy on the planet. Embarrassment gave way to anger and
sadness as he slunk away. His father had lied to him. Lied! There
wasn't any magic in the world.

There never had been.

2. BEYOND AVARICE


It's difficult for any child growing up to understand that their
father is famous. For a start, he is just your father, nothing else,
nothing exceptional. Tim was almost ten before he finally grasped
that his dad was a little different from everyone else's dad; that
people were interested in the old man - what he was doing, what
he said, and, most importantly, what he was thinking about. And
not just the villagers in Empingham where they lived, but people
on a lot of sites in the datasphere. In fact, when Tim, aged nine,
loaded 'Jeff Baker' in a findbot, he was rather surprised when it
listed two hundred and thirty-eight thousand primary references.

According to the first eight entries (all university libraries) Jeff
Baker had designed the molecular structure of solid-state crystal
memories, the ultimate electronic storage mechanism. It was the
single most important component around which the entire datasphere

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now revolved. All human information was stored in the
one specific type of lattice that his dad had worked out. His dad.
The man who wouldn't let him have a puppy, and who was
hopeless at playing football with him. His dad! The datasphere had
got to be kidding - like magic, Tim told himself sourly.

But the datasphere didn't lie. His dad was truly famous. Not
that fame was of much practical use in this case. Fame usually
came hand in hand with fabulous wealth. The Bakers were certainly
very comfortably off: they lived in a sprawling manor on the