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

among tolerant adults. And at University he'd begun to encounter people who felt
the same way he did about such things, enough people to persuade him that his
laissez-faire attitude toward social interaction was simply a minority view,
rather than a mental defect per se, a result of his having been orphaned or some
repartitioning of his brain to make room for gardening or mathematics. So he'd
spent several years of study in a sort of private resistance movement, asserting
himself, presenting himself in precisely the forthright manner that everyone
claimed to respect and admire.
It was the worst time of his life, bar none; this phantom "decorum" was no
trifling matter, but actually some kind of genetically coded pecking order
thing. Even he didn't like tactless boors, though for a while they'd become his
only company. So he'd decided to approach these foolishly subtle but socially
compulsory responses as a kind of language, and with less effort than he would
later spend learning Bad Tongan, had gone about memorizing their basic
vocabulary and grammar.
The effort had proved, at best, a partial success, but it did give him some
foundation to work from. And through his father's alcohol recipes, he'd found
both courage and a kind of unselfconscious ease that really helped, especially
if other people were drinking as well. What happy drunks they'd made! Being good
at darts and shuffleboard had also proven useful.
He'd still been prone to fits of distraction, but that was at least partially a
consequence of his having to impress the scholarship committee or starve. This
was before all the money had started. And the fame, yes. Tamra's court had
sharpened those social skills still further, in a careless, sink-or-swim kind of
way. But by then, settling into life at Nuku'alofa, he'd found a kind of prison
accreting around him: erstwhile colleagues tarring him with labels like "tycoon"
and "politician," while the media adopted him as a sort of Romeo Einstein.
Increasingly, people seemed to "know" a de Towaji whom Bruno himself had never
met.
Even at courtЧor perhaps especially thereЧno one seemed prepared to advise him,
to take him under a friendly wing, to understand his life or his problems at
all. Was he permitted to have problems? Even Tamra, wrestling incomprehensible
demons of her own, had thrown her hands up at his grousing. That was when he'd
begun to daydreamЧand eventually obsessЧabout the end of time, and the arc de
fin that would someday show it to him.
And of course living alone meant not having to think about these things at all,
getting lazy about them, forming a bond with the house software that gradually
let the language devolve to shorthand codes and even, sorry to say, preverbal
grunting and pointing. At least he wasn't in his underwear.
So with a twinge of guilt and no decorum whatsoever, he simply strode to the
edge of the platform and looked down, pressing first his hands and then his
forehead against the slick, clear surface of the dome, straining for a view of
the sun.
The best he could manage was an edge of the corona, the vast, diffuse, superhot
solar atmosphere. As in an eclipse, magnetic field lines stood out clearly;
looping threads of bright and dim against the blue-white glow, but much nearer
than any eclipse he'd ever seen. Beneath this platform, the corona flared huge,
as wide as ten full moons, as structured and detailed as a wreath of burning,
phosphorescent ivy.
"Quite a view," he said. "We're close in. Six months until this ring falls in?