"Michael Moorcock - The Affair of the Bassin Les Hivers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

Monsieur Zenith: A Brief History

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тАЬI suspect our murderer had good reason to dispose of the corpse in this
way,тАЭ declared Lapointe. тАЬMy guess is that her face and body were both too
well known for her to be simply dropped in the Seine, while the murderer
did not wish to be observed moving her through the streets of Paris, either
because he himself was also highly recognisable or because he had no
easy way of doing what he needed to do. And no alibi. So, if not one
himself, he called in an expert, no doubt a person already known to him.тАЭ
 тАЬAn expert? You mean such people understood about metatemporal
transcience in the 1820s?тАЭ

тАЬGenerally speaking, of course, very few of our ancestors understood
such things. Even fewer than today. We are not talking of time-travel, which
as we all know is impossible, but movement from one universe to another
where one era has developed at a slower rate in relation to ours. Needless
to say, we are not discussing our own past, but a period approximating our
own present. ThatтАЩs why most of our cases take us to periods equivalent to
our own 20th or early 21st century. So we are dealing here with a remote
scale, far removed from our own. Another reason for our murderer to put as
many alternative planesтАЩ scales between our own and theirs.тАЭ

Lapointe was discussing the worlds of the multiverse, separated one
from another by mass rather than time. Each world was of enormously
larger or smaller scale to the next, enabling all the alternate universes which
made up the great multiverse to coexist, one invisible to the other for
reasons of size. Not until the great French scientist Benoit Mandelbrot had
developed these theories had it become possible for certain adepts to
increase or decrease their own mass and cross from one of these worlds
to the other. Mandelbrot had effectively provided us with maps of our own
brains, plans of the multiverse. This in turn had led to the setting up of
secret government agencies designed to create policies and departments
whose function was to deal with the new realities.

Now almost every major nation had some equivalent to the STP in
some version of its own 21st century, apart from the United States, which
had largely succeeded in refusing to enter that century in any significant
sense and was forced to rely on foreign agents to cope with the problems
arising from situations with their roots in the 21st century.

тАЬBut you are convinced, chief, that the murderer is French?тАЭ

тАЬIf not French, then they have lived in France for many years.тАЭ

Used not to questioning his superiorтАЩs instinctive judgements, Le Bec
accepted this.