"Matthew Hughes - A Herd of Opportunity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Matt)

were all the elemental Events, Situations, and Landscapes of the human story: from the Discovery of the
New Land to the Invasion of the Barbarians; from the First Kiss of Innocence to the Scorning of the
Inamorata; from the Forest of the Beasts to the City of the Machines.

Over thousands of years, the nosphere, colloquially called the Commons, was thoroughly mapped and
delineated by resolute explorers. By adapting the lesson of the dawn-time orphic myth of the singer
whose songs had kept him safe in the underworld, they discovered that chanting certain sequences of
tones--the technical term was thrans--would allow them to pass safely through the nodes that connected
one Location to another. Other thrans could hide the nonauts from the perceptions of the Commons's
denizens. The latter ability was important, whether dealing with the general archetypical figures or the
idiomatic entities that inhabited specific Locations. Many of these were appallingly violent by their very
natures, but any of them could become dangerous if disharmonious elements were added to the stories
that were, literally, their existence.
The Commons, then, was the most wonderful, most terrible, of places. Every joy, every horror, was
crystallized there, in a realm that was timeless though not boundless; for the early explorers had
discovered a barrier--it usually presented itself as an endless chain of mountains, or a topless wall of
closely fitted white blocks of stone--between the human nosphere and the collective unconsciousness of
any other intelligent species. The wall could be neither breached nor climbed. Nor could it be dug under,
for there was nothing below the "ground" of the Commons but the formless gray sea of unsapience
through which swam the great blind Worm of preconsciousness, eternally seeking to devour its own tail
... or, as one unlucky nonaut pioneer found, anything else that entered the pearly light of its "waters."

None of the few telepathic species that humans had encountered could breach the wall. Thus it was
concluded that each Commons must operate on its own unique "frequency," though what these purported
frequencies might be had never been conclusively demonstrated. Still, it was accepted that the separation
of Commonses, each from all others, was a fundamental underpinning of the universe, like the
gravitational constant and the three speeds of light.
****
Bandar was musing on the import of the Bololos' contamination when the two scholars emerged from an
alley directly across from the Hotel Splendor. They crossed the dusty street and mounted the stairs to the
verandah, where a mustachioed man in a garishly patterned suit stood behind a lectern on top of which
rested a roll of paper tickets. "Next charabanc leaves in twenty minutes," he told the pair as they
approached, adding, "No charge."

Huffley took two tickets. He looked about for somewhere to wait out of the sun, but there were no seats
outside the establishment.

"Master," Bandar said, "perhaps a cold beer would wash away the iron taste of the water they gave us at
the Sequestrance."

The young man noted that his words brought them a sidelong glance from the ticket-seller, but Huffley
was already through the hotel's swinging half-doors. Bandar followed him into a large room. A
heterogeneous crowd was taking advantage of the availability of food and beverages dispensed from
behind a well-polished bar and carried to the dozens of tables by young women wearing uniforms
apparently designed to avoid the slightest possibility of confusion over their gender. At the back of the
room, spinning wheels, flashing lights, and occasional cries or wails betokened victory or defeat at games
of chance.

The Institute men took seats at an empty table and ordered flagons of ale from a passing server whose
attributes caused Bandar's eyes to follow her as she departed, until Huffley's booted toe connected with