"Will McCarthy - Bloom" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

Oh, all right, the place is not entirely without its charm. The food is mostly synthetic, don't ask me why,
but an ethic of rebellion has taken hold of the culinary centers, leading to a cuisine which is certainly very
different from anything else you're likely to see. Anti-naturalism at its most refined: my lunch, eaten at a
corner stand with twice as many diners as stools, consisted of chewy blue spheres with vaguely meatlike
flavor, steeped in a sweet, translucent gravy that tasted chemical, medicinal. This was ladled onto a
mound of starchy pellets and served in an iron cup, with an oversized spoon and a glass of water and a
napkin of dubious cleanliness. Good? No, not really. But different.

Need I say more about the town itself? I think not. Eventually, I found my way to the relatively open
spaces of the shipyard, where the ceilings were higher, the walls farther apart, the crowds less hurried
and surly. It's a methodical business, the building and servicing of spaceships, and this was immediately
apparent in the look and feel of the place. Large, complicated tools, pushed or carried with delicacy.
Unexplained power cables running here and there, but stapled to the walls, out of the way of tripping
feet. And signs everywhere, warning and exhorting: ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE, THIS
MEANS YOU!!! CAUTION: LASER LIGHT. CAUTION: ELECTRIC FIELD. CAUTION:
LIGHT FROM WELDING ARCS CAN DAMAGE YOUR EYE. There were even a few weirdly
encouraging ones, such as PLEASE MOVE SAFELY and WORK WITHOUT EATING MAY CAUSE
DIZZINESS .
True enough.

The scale and clutter of the place were a bit daunting. It actually took me a few minutes to realize that the
great shapes all around, in every hangar and chamber, surrounded by frames and trusses and hoists and
quietly industrious people, were in fact real ships and not mock ups or test articles or large pieces of
support machinery. The strange openings in the ceiling were doors leading up into tunnels leading up into
airlocks leading up into hard cold vacuum. I found the thought strangely sobering.

Louis Pasteur was coming together on Platform 28, and the zee map guided me there without error.
Like the other ships, Pasteur was imprisoned in rigging and scaffolding. I'd seen her blueprints many
times by now, and from what I could see she looked just like them. And yetтАж Well, there was still
something odd, something vaguely disturbing about the look of her. The hull was bumpy, spiky, almost
protozoan in appearanceтАФthat much I'd been prepared for. But the t-balance tactile camouflage,
designed to trick technogenic lebenforms into thinking it part of their own substance, was clearly more
than a simple coating of paint.

How to describe it? The way it caught the light, the way it gleamedтАж Pictures do no justice. Rainbow
gray it was, like oil on water, except that it seemed to be made up of thousands of tiny dots, except that
as I came closer, the dots broke up into millions of smaller dots, then millions more, smaller and smaller
until it hurt the eye. They gave a vague impression of motion, like ants. Yes, I remember ants, remember
looking down on their nests as they swarmed over some hapless insect, their bodies too tiny to make out
individually, at least from a distance, so that the mass of them had the look of a living, boiling, fractal
whole. T-balance looked a lot like that, in a way, although I understood at once that the motion was an
illusion, that if I kept my head and eyes perfectly still the strangeness would evaporate, and the hull's
coating would settle into a sort of wet, pointillist glaze.

From a ramp on Pasteur's underside, behind the cables and scaffolding, voices emanated. I peered,
drawing closer, and was able to make out faces: Vaclav Lottick and two men I didn't recognize, both
dressed in eye-blue spacer coveralls. Lottick looked up, saw me.

"Strasheim," he said curtly. "Over here."