"M. John Harrison - Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

'Some people from Sony, I think.'
It was Kearney's turn to laugh.
 'Gordon is a prat,' he said.
'Gordon,' said Tate, 'is the funding. Shall I spell that for you? It starts F-U.'
'Fuck you too,' Kearney told him. 'Sony could swallow Gordon with a glass of water.' He looked
round at the equipment. 'They must be desperate. Have we achieved anything this week?'
Tate shrugged.
'It's always the same problem,' he said.
He was a tallish man with mild eyes who spent his free time, to the extent he had any, devising a
complexity-based architectural system, full of shapes and curves he described as 'natural'. He lived in
Croydon, and his wife, who was older than him by a decade, had two children from her previous
marriage. Perhaps as a reminder of his Los Alamos past, Tate favoured bowling shirts, horn-rimmed
glasses and a careful haircut which made him look like Buddy Holly.
'We can slow down the rate at which the q-bits pick up phase. We're actually doing better than
Kielpinski there тАФ I've had factors of four and up this week.'
He shrugged.
'After that, noise wins. No q-bit. No quantum computer.'
'And that's it?
'That's it.' Tate took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. 'Oh. There was one thing.'
'What?'
'Come and look at this.'
Tate had installed a thirty-inch superflat display on a credenza at the back of the room. He did
something to a keyboard and it lit up an icy blue colour. Somewhere off in its parallel mazes, the Beowulf
system began modelling the decoherence-free subspace тАФ the Kielpinski space тАФ of an ion-pair. Its
filmy, energetic extensions reminded Kearney of the aurora borealis. 'We've seen this before,' he said.
'Watch, though,' Tate warned him. 'Just before it decays. I've slowed it down about a million times,
but it's still hard to catch -there!'
A cascade of fractals like a bird's wing, so tiny Kearney barely noticed it. But the female oriental,
whose sensory-motor uptake times had been engineered by different biological considerations, was off
his shoulder in an instant. She approached the screen, which was now blank, and batted it repeatedly
with her front paws, stopping every so often to look into them as though she expected to have caught
something. After a moment the male cat came out from wherever it had been hiding and tried to join in.
She looked down at it, chattering angrily.
Tate laughed and switched the display off.
'She does that every time,' he said.
'She can see something we can't. Whatever it is goes on after the part we can see.'
'There's not really anything there at all.'
'Run it again.'
'It's just some artefact,' Tate insisted. 'It's not in the actual data. I wouldn't have shown you if I thought
it was.'
Kearney laughed.
'That's encouraging,' he said. 'Will it slow down any further?'
'I could try, I suppose. But why bother? It's a bug.'
'Try,' said Kearney. 'Just for fun.' He stroked the cat. She jumped back onto his shoulder. 'You're a
good girl,' he said absently. He pulled some things out of a desk-drawer. Among them was a little
discoloured leather bag which contained the dice he had stolen from the Shrander twenty-three years
before. He put his hand inside. The dice felt warm against his fingers. Kearney shivered over a sudden
clear image of the woman in the Midlands, kneeling on a bed and whispering 'I want so much to come' to
herself in the middle of the night. To Tate, he said: 'I might have to go away for a while.'
'You've only just come back,' Tate reminded him. 'We'd get on quicker if you were here more often.