"David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 8" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hartwell David G)

as he became a plumber again, then heтАЩd be giving some alms.
She ate her food, licked her fingers, then fell asleep against him, in the moving bus. He brushed the
free hair from her dirty face. She was twenty days older now. тАЬThis is a pearl,тАЭ he said aloud. тАЬThis is a
pearl by far too rare to be contained within the shell of time and space.тАЭ
Why had those lines come to him, in such a rush? Had he read them somewhere? Or were those
lines his own?


Slow Life
MICHAEL SWANWICK

Michael Swanwick is a major player in todayтАЩs grand game of
science fiction. His first novel, In the Drift (1984), an alternate-history novel in which the Three
Mile Island reactor exploded, was one of Terry CarrтАЩs Ace Specials in the same series as William
GibsonтАЩs Neuromancer and Kim Stanley RobinsonтАЩs The Wild Shore. Since then he has published
his fine novels at a rate of one every three or four years: Vacuum Flowers (1987), Stations of the
Tide (1991), The Iron DragonтАЩs Daughter (1993тАФwhat he called тАЬhard fantasyтАЭ) the sharply satiric
Jack Faust (1997), and his new novel, Bones of the Earth (2002), expanded from his Hugo
AwardтАУwinning story тАЬScherzo with Tyrannosaur.тАЭ His short fiction is collected in GravityтАЩs
Angels (1991), Geography of Unknown Lands (1997), Moon Dogs (2000), Tales of Old Earth (2000),
and Puck AleshireтАЩs Abecedary (2000). Swanwick is also the author of two influential critical
essays, one on SF, тАЬUserтАЩs Guide to the PostmodernsтАЭ(1985), and one on fantasy, тАЬIn The
TraditionтАж.тАЭ (1994).
тАЬSlow Life,тАЭ in the mode of Hal Clement and Arthur C. Clarke, is from Analog, and is one of
SwanwickтАЩs occasional forays into hard SF. Swanwick links satire of our over-connected

technological present, of online chat and instantaneous entertainment news, with the grand
wonders of the cosmos, adventures on the grand scale, and good old-fashioned SF wonder, in an
entertaining clash of SF cultures.
тАЬIt was the Second Age of Space. Gagarin, Shepard, Glenn, and Armstrong were all dead. It was
our turn to make history now.тАЭ
тАФThe Memoirs of Lizzie OтАЩBrien

The raindrop began forming ninety kilometers above the surface of Titan. It started with an infinitesimal
speck of tholin, adrift in the cold nitrogen atmosphere. Diano-acetylene condensed on the seed nucleus,
molecule by molecule, until it was one shard of ice in a cloud of billions.
Now the journey could begin.
It took almost a year for the shard of ice in question to precipitate downward twenty-five kilometers,
where the temperature dropped low enough that ethane began to condense on it. But when it did, growth
was rapid.
Down it drifted.
At forty kilometers, it was for a time caught up in an ethane cloud. There it continued to grow.
Occasionally it collided with another droplet and doubled in size. Finally it was too large to be held
effortlessly aloft by the gentle stratospheric winds.
It fell.
Falling, it swept up methane and quickly grew large enough to achieve a terminal velocity of almost
two meters per second.
 At twenty-seven kilometers, it passed through a dense layer of methane clouds. It acquired more
methane, and continued its downward flight.
As the air thickened, its velocity slowed and it began to lose some of its substance to evaporation. At
two and a half kilometers, when it emerged from the last patchy clouds, it was losing mass so rapidly it

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