"Learning The World" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

"Ah. Very good. At least I'll be remembered for something more than Darvin's Little Bastards."

"It would be better if you find Darvin's Planet," said Orro.

Darvin wasn't sure if this was a jibe or a kind word. He chose to take it well.

"Still looking, of course," he said. "I'll have the current batch finished in a couple of days, and then the next eight-days' worth will come in. So it goes."

"I'd like a look at these, if I may," said Orro. "It might be possible to work out the comet's path, and where it's going."

"That would be wonderful," said Darvin. "Where are we going, by the way?"

Orro stopped and looked around as if lost. They had emerged onto a small plaza from an alleyway between the student roosts and the back of the Study of Ancient Times Building. Orro closed his eyes and shook his head.

"I'll just take you there," he said.

The Gevorkian set off again with confident stride. Darvin hurried after him, though the scratch of his friend's claws made him want to take wing. After crossing the plaza and negotiating another couple of alleys, through which trudges were hauling carts of fresh-killed prey for the refectory, they arrived at a patch of waste ground before the slope to the riverbank.

The air was heavy, loud with insects and the laughter of students wing-sailing on skiffs on the water. Yells rose when someone fell off.

On the patch of waste ground, surrounded by a sparse crowd of idle students and curious town kits, and watched over by a stern technician, stood a contraption that Darvin recognised as the realization of his inspiration and his sketch. He spread his arms and wings in exultation. "Brilliant!" he said.

It was a long cylinder of rough white fabric, about two wingspans in diameter, made rigid by eight rings of bendwood, and held in place by guy-ropes like a tent. At one of its open ends stood the dirigible engine, mounted on sturdy trestles, its propeller facing the entrance to the tube. Halfway along it was a large acetate window, into which peered the kinematographic camнera on its tripod.

"Well," said Orro, "to work!"

He signalled to the technician, who warned everyoneЧespecially the kitsЧout of the way, and hauled on the starter. The engine coughed into life with a fart of petroleum smoke. The propeller began to turn, slowly at first, then faster, until it became a deadly flashing disc. The trestles shuddered but reнmained in position.

Orro stepped to the kinematograph, and Darvin walked around to the end of the tube and faced into the gale that blasted towards him. He threw himself forward, taking to the air, and laboriously flew halfway down the tube, to where a large black cross was marked on the floor and black lines gridded the side opposite the window. With some difficulty he managed to make himself fly above the spot, maintaining position without hovering but as though flying into headwind.

"That's it!" he heard Orro shouting, through the window and above the howl of the engine. "Hold it there! Flap! Flap!"


3ЧSpectral Lines

14364:06:1801:25

I hate Horrocks Mathematical. He's the crewman who runs the training habitat I had the bad luck to pick. Node 52 on the gamma ring. (It says here.) I'm sitting/lying in the branches of an air-tree, in a cocoon that's like a sort of sleeping bag combined with a hammock. Everybody around me is snoring (or making even more disgusting and distracting noises) and I'm exнhausted, my bones and muscles are aching, but I can't sleep. Not yet.

The day started well. I decided long ago that I wasn't going to take my training along with all my friends, or even with people I knew. It's not like I inнtend to homestead with them, and besides, being with the same people as I've grown up with would not be exactly the Out There Experience.

I got up before sun-on, and walked out in the dimнness of farlight to that copse from which I had once tried to climb the sky. The ladder was long since gone, along with all the rest of the leftover scaffolding of the world, its components recycled or perhaps added to the mountains of trash, now much diminished, piled against the forward wall for throwing as reaction mass into the maw of the drive. I found a comfortable enough place to lean my back against, on an ivy-grown cuboid structure that might have been the ladder's base. Bats flitted and chirped among the trees. A few early birds stirred, and some small animal moved in the long grass. It didn't look like anything that could harm me.

My virtuality genes haven't kicked in yet. (This is an admission.) (The other stuff is happening, all right?) So I blinked up the sky opposite on my conнtacts. The world disappeared, like it does. The sky took its place. I chose a stable image, one not turning with the world. The Destiny Star is hard to pick out without cheating, but I did it, sighting carefully along where my memory placed the forward cone. It's brighter than the others in its region, that's all. The sight of it works a strange effect on my diaphragm, on what the ancients called the heart. Something between a gasp and a jump; something between home and hope. It's likeЧall right, this is childish, butЧit's like I've all my life been an exile from some marvellous place, and now I can see it in the distance. I couldn't see its comet-cloud around us, of course, not without magnification, but just burning there it looks haloed with glamour.

I turned carefully, my gaze sweeping along the Bright Road, and faced in the opposite direction, through the rearward cone. The Red Sun is easy to spot, of course, and around itЧwhich is to say, behind itЧone by one until they multiply in a haze, the green-tinged stars of the Civil Worlds. I tried to think of the trillions of worlds, some larger than ours, some smaller, that that green glow proclaimed, and the quadrillions of people and indeed of stranger beings that inhabit them. How vast it all was. And in the whole sky, how small.


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