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

stroked seven times through his hair, becoming a heated styling comb on the
eighth stroke. The fax produced fresh clothingЧsuitable for companyЧthat
smoothed and buttoned itself around him as the robots fussed.
He refused an application of blush.
"Is it landing here? Nearby?" he asked.
"Its course indicates a touchdown in the meadow, forty meters to the east. It is
recommended that you remain indoors until this procedure is complete."
"Hmm? Yes, well. Full transparency on the roof and east wall, please."
Obligingly, a third of the house turned to glass. To actual glass, yesЧwellstone
was an early form of programmable matter[Footnote: See Appendix A:
Wellstone]Чand if danger threatened it could just as easily turn to impervium or
Bunkerlite, or some other durable superreflector.
"There's a good house," he murmured approvingly, his eyes scanning the
now-visible sky.
Despite the interruption, despite the loss of his collapsium and the rudeness of
this too-swift approach, Bruno found himself almost anticipating the landing,
the arrival of visitors. Almost. It was a long time since he'd last had company,
and that had just been the men from the neutronium barge, eager for a breath of
fresh air before turning their ship around and faxing themselves back home.
One of them, newly rich and bursting with gratitude, had given Bruno a gift: a
neuble-sized diamond ball filled with water instead of neutronium. There'd been
algae and bacteria and near-microscopic brine shrimp inside, a whole ecology
that needed only light to function, perhaps eternally. "In case you get lonely,
sir," the man had said. Indoors, though, Bruno's light-dark cycles were
irregular, and the thing had died on his shelf in a matter of weeks. His last
human interaction. A lesson?
The morning sky shone brightly through the glass. Bruno asked for a reticle to
indicate the ship's position, and the house obligingly cast up a circle of green
light the size of a dinner plate, which barely moved and inside which he could
see nothing. Soon there were glints of yellow-white at the center, though,
sunlight reflecting from bright metal, and in another minute he could see an
actual dot beyond the shallow blue-white haze of his atmosphere. The dot
resolved into a little toy ship, then a big toy ship drifting high above the
skyЧa wingless metal teardrop spilling outside the boundaries of the green
reticleЧand finally, with alarming swiftness, it swelled to something the size
of his house and burst though the feathery cirrus layer and the haze beneath it.
Clouds rolled off its bright burnished skin, seeming to wrinkle and snap in the
blur of a gravity deflection field. Jets fired, little blasts of yellow-hot
plasma that scorched his meadow grass white, then black, in tight bull's-eye
circles. A shadow raced from the horizon to throw itself beneath the vehicle as
the space between it and terra firma shrank to meters, centimeters, nothing.
There was no thump of impact, no solid confirmation of landing until the
maneuvering jets darkened and the shimmer of the deflection field snapped away
into clear focus. The sounds of reentry and landing had been no louder than a
breeze through the treetops. Skillfully done.
What fixed Bruno's attention, though, was the seal imprinted on the side of that
gleaming hull: a blue, white, and green Earth shaded by twin palms, with three
more planets hovering in the background. And hanging above them all, a crown of
monocrystalline diamond.
"Door," he said, standing in front of a row of shelves, looking past them at the