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

seem to surround yourself with the tasteful."
"Usually," she said, and took his arm. "Did Tusite give you a hard time?"
"I'm not sure," he admitted. "She seems to have her doubts about me."
"She does have a good memory."
Tamra herself had adopted a blue-gray, long-sleeved evening gown thatЧlike
Bruno's jacketЧsuggested Venus was no longer the hot-house of ages past.
Circling her brow was a simple platinum band, adequate for semiformal occasions
where she was, nonetheless, on public display.
Robot guards came to life for them as they approached the fax gate, transiting
ahead of them to prepare the way. Watching them disappear was interesting; the
gate itself didn't look like anything, just a vertical slab of blackish material
swathed in a thin layer of fog. But the robots melted into it with tiny pops and
flashes, like ice cubes slipping into something carbonated and phosphorescent.
It took some conscious effort to approach the slab as though it weren't there,
but stepping through it was as easy as stepping through a curtain, and provided
as little in the way of sensation. On the other side lay a gallery, a vast mall
of stone and glass, its windows looking down on twilit cloud tops.
The robots' heels and toes clicked against a floor of glossy stone as they
danced out of the way, elegantly unobtrusive, their movements interrupted not at
all by the journey between planets.
Bruno marveled again that faxing now seemed to provoke no sensation at all,
though their bodies were sundered, atomized, quantum-entangled and finally
recreated. Exactly as before? Indistinguishable, anyway. The soul, it was
imagined, followed the entangled quantum states to the new location.
Inconvenient to think it might be destroyed and duplicated along with the body,
or worse, that copies of it might be piling up in an afterlife somewhere. But
weighed against crowds and traffic and bad weather and all the other
inconveniences of physical travel, people were surprisingly willing to take the
risk.
At any rate, in the early days of faxing there'd been some pain, some
discomfort, some small degree of disorientation that let you know the transfer
had happened. This new way, it hardly seemed like travel at all. This might as
well have been another room of Tamra's palace, or anyplace, really.
He paused at the transom, turning, eyeing their new surroundings dubiously.
Venus? It looked more like Colorado, some glassine lodge clinging to the side of
a mountain, looking down on someone else's rain clouds. Above, stars twinkled
faintly, as if through a yellow-brown layer of smog. All around the floor were
man-high juniper trees in iron pots, not in rows but scattered, a faux forest
lying silent and still. Behind the fax gate lay the rock face itself, Maxwell
Monies, sealed and structurally reinforced but otherwise left in its natural
state, smooth basalt planes broken at jagged edges like petrified layers of
pastry. The floor beneath them was opaque and solid, probably a single sheet of
whiskered stone held up by metal stanchions and trusswork without a gram of
wellstone anywhere in the mix. Why risk a power failure dumping one's party
guestsЧnot to mention one's junipersЧscreaming into the cloud deck below?
As far as other guests went, Bruno didn't see any, but then again this was
clearly a kind of hallway, a place between places, albeit a large oneЧforty
meters across if it was an inch. In both directions, the stone and glass
followed natural contours of the mountain, folding around corners and out of
view. They were on a promontory of sorts, a jutting outcrop of rock; above, the