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

experimental technology, protected from my crew-mates only by a curtain-thin cabin wall? The ship's
interior was slightly smaller than my tiny house in Philusburg, and the mission would last 280 days, or just
a hair over nine months. It sounded like a boarding-school nightmare, a crowded, bickering nightmare of
bunk-bed privacy and no possibility of escape. No possibility even of a walk to cool off, to let anxiety
clear slowly from the air. How could we keep from murdering each other? God knew, such things had
happened before.

My revulsion was so sharp and so immediate that I realized in a sudden, scharfblick moment that the
decision was already made. Guess what, friend, I would be going on the mission; these things would
happen, would become my daily reality. And how could it be otherwise? I neither loved nor hated
reporting; I was it. Always had been, even as an Earthly child, running around with a transcription
palmtop and a mouthful of pestering questions. Cobblering was an uneasy compromise, something I
could do well enough to be of use to others, but when offered the chance to serve mankind in my own
true way, with my own true talents, could I refuse? Certainly not, I realized. Certainly not. So whatever
the records may say, my journey began precisely at that moment.

The car sped on, hurtling now through the downward leg of the tunnel's parabola. I took the opportunity
to flash in an update from my net channels, the four that I moderated and the four others to which I made
daily contributions. Skimming the topic headers, sorting them into priority groups for later viewing. Not
enough time to read them now, of course, not before landing, but I did compose a message of my own, a
brief narration and video collage of the Louis Pasteur, its mission, and my own proposed role.

I flashed it out just as the lights came up, along with the warning chimes, as the ballista on the Philusburg
end caught me in its decelerating grip. I fell softly against the padded wall and quickly began growing
heavy, and then heavier, and heavier still, and then the pressure eased back just before it could grow
uncomfortable, just before the need to breathe and the difficulty of doing so could become alarming.
Leaving me to drift to my feet at standard gravity, feather-light by the standards of my youth.

Light spilled into the car as it clamshelled open, releasing me onto the empty platform, and as I stepped
away the vehicle sank into a recess in the tunnel wall, to be loaded onto the outbound ballista back to
Ansharton. I looked around briefly at the mirrored walls, my own reflection distorted beyond recognition
by the rounded contours, by the light pouring up from below. Finally, I found a slot to shove my debit
card into, then mounted the escalator and rode it down to street level. Philusburg blossomed around me,
a smaller town than Ansharton but in many ways a more energetic one, its sidewalks mobile, its buildings
designed, in many cases, to change shape over the course of the day, taking advantage of shifts in the
lighting conditions. My home, these past twenty years, a cavern-city of lead and iron and sparkling gold,
and yes, I did love it. And do.

It was funny how different the houses all looked from one another. Nobody likes iron shingle all that
much, it's true, but the waste metal has to go somewhere, and buildings have to be made of something,
and in the end the crews simply click a house together from standard patterns, because they don't have
the time to waste any more than you or I do. But in Philusburg, more and more residents were bucking
the system and customizing, adding molded Tudor facings or shiny filigrees or little silver gargoyles, or
whatever. They say time is the heaviest metal, and indeed only absurd sacrifice can bring these things
about. But sacrifice gets to be a habit after a while. Even I had felt the pinch a few years back, and
slapped a coat of paint on my little tin castle. Green.

I'd be passing it in a few minutes if I continued down the hauptstrasse, but it seemed I wouldn't have the
factory job to worry about much longer, so once my feet hit the sidewalk I switched tracks and went the
other way, not back to work but instead toward the sanitarium on the city's south end, near the archway