"The Collapsium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

The Collapsium - Wil McCarthyThe Collapsium
Wil McCarthy
for Quentin and Casey,
because I said so
About the author
Wil McCarthy, after ten years of rocket science with Lockheed Martin, traded the
hectic limelight of the space program for the peace and quiet (ha!) of
commercial robotics at Omnitech, where he works as a research and development
hack.
He writes a monthly column for the SciFi Channel's news magazine
(www.scifi.com/sfw), and his less truthful writings have appeared in Aboriginal
SF, Analog, Interzone, Asimov's Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, and
various anthologies. His most recent novel, Bloom, was selected as a New York
Times Notable Book. Further biographical and bibliographic information is
available at: http://www.sff.net/people/wmccarth
Acknowledgments
I'd like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Chris Schluep, Shelly Shapiro, Scott
Edelman, and Simon Spanton for understanding and believing in this project.
Wouldn't trade you guys for diamonds. Also, for their help in nailing down the
basic ideas on which the novel rests, I'm indebted to Gary Snyder, Richard
Powers, and especially Shawna McCarthy for being so difficult to please. The
many people who helped with technical details are listed separately in Appendix
C, but I'll extend special thanks here to Bernhard Haisch for inspiration and
for serving as a brilliant sounding board, and to Sid Gluckman for making a
place where imagination matters.
For assistance on matters of Tongan language and culture, I'm grateful to Lonely
Planet's Errol H., and Vincenc Riullop and Periques des Palottes for information
about Catalonia.
Also many thanks and apologies to those who faced the early drafts of this
story, including Geoffrey A. Landis, Stanley Schmidt, Richard Powers, Maureen F.
McHugh, and Cathy, my long-suffering copilot.
Book I
Once upon a matter crushed
1
In which an important experiment is disrupted
In the eighth decade of the Queendom of Sol, on a miniature planet in the middle
depths of the Kuiper Belt, there lived a man named Bruno de Towaji who, at the
time of our earliest attention, was beginning his 3088th morning walk around the
world.
The word "morning" is used advisedly here, since along the way he walked through
the day and night and back again without pausing to rest. It was a very small
planet, barely six hundred meters across, circled by an even tinier "sun" and
"moon" of Bruno's own design.
Walk with him: see his footpath cutting through the blossomy meadow, feel the
itch of pollens in your eyes and nose. Now pass through into the midday forest,
with its shafts of sunlight filtering warmly through the canopy. The trees are
low and wide, citrus and honeysuckle and dogwood, not so much a shady,
mushroom-haunted wilderness as a compromise with physical lawЧtaller trees would
reach right out of the troposphere. As it is, the highest limbs brush and break
apart the puffy summer clouds that happen by.