"Tom Maddox - Halo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maddox Tom)

running around.
At The Evergreen State College, many people who gave technical advice.
(Perhaps needless to say, any consequent blunders are entirely mine.) Mike
Beug and Paul Stamets, world-class mycologists and explainers, talked to me
about mushrooms and provided invaluable references. Mark Papworth applied a
coroner's eye to a carcass I made. The faculty and students of the Habitats
Coordinated Studies Program, 1988-89 helped me to think about a space
habitat's ecosystem.
A list, much too long to include here, of friends, both colleagues and
students, at Evergreen -- though I have to mention Barbara Smith and David
Paulsen, whose cabin and cat make cameo appearances.
And all I've known who can find a piece of themselves in this book.


I. of V.

Everything is destined to reappear as simulation.
Jean Baudrillard, America

1. Burning, Burning

On a rainy morning in Seattle, Gonzales was ready for the egg. A week ago
he had returned from Myanmar, the country once known as Burma, and now, after
two days of drugs and fasting, he was prepared: he had become an alien, at
home in a distant landscape.
His brain was filled with blossoms of fire, their spread white flesh
torched to yellow, the center of a burning world. On the dark stained oak
door, angel wings danced in blue flame, their faces beatific in the cold fire.
Staring at the animated carved figures, Gonzales thought, the fire is in my
eyes, in my brain.
He pushed down the s-curved brass handle and stepped through to the
hallway, his split-toed shoes of soft cotton and rope scuffing without noise
across floors of bleached oak. Through the open door at the hallway's end,
morning's light through stained glass made abstract patterns of crimson and
buttery yellow. Inside the room, a blue monitor console stood against the far
wall, SenTrax corporate sunburst glowing on its face; in the center of the
room was the egg, split hemispheres of chromed steel, cracked and waiting. One
half-egg was filled with beige tubes and snakes of optic cable, the other half
with hard dark plastic lying slack against the shell.
Gonzales rubbed his hands across his eyes, then pulled his hair back into
a long hank and slipped a circle of elastic over it. He reached to his waist
and grabbed the bottom hem of his navy blue t-shirt and pulled the shirt over
his head. Dropping it to the floor, he kicked off his shoes, stepped out of
baggy tan pants and loose white cotton underpants and stood naked, his pale
skin gleaming with a light coat of sweat. His skin felt hot, eyes grainy,
stomach sore.
He stepped up and into a chrome half-egg, then shivered and lay back as
body-warmth liquid bled into the slack plastic, which began to balloon
underneath him. He took hold of finger-thick cables and pushed their junction
ends home into the sockets set in the back of his neck. As the egg continued