"Continuing Time - 98 - Lord November" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

the time the insertion beam could be resynchronized.
It did not seem to Bodhi that he was taking excessively long; time shrank as he
approached lightspeed, and in his time only about ten hours passed as he
accelerated to make his pass at the Gate, and another ten as he missed and
decelerated to zero. But he knew it was not so; in the Continuing Time at large
days passed with each approach, and with each deceleration.
There was a deadline to his attempts; one of the House of NovemberТs precious
few tachyon starships, the Reeny Ihr, was en route to Devnet, and was due to
arrive there in sixty-eight days.
It was not until BodhiТs fifth pass, twenty-seven days after beginning, that
EloiseТs Third Gate, entryway to the long tunnel to Devnet, opened at
BodhisatvaТs approach, and swallowed the Shivering Bastard.

When Devnet fell silent; when ship after ship of the November Guard failed to
return after entering the long tunnel to Devnet; and when the famous, formidable
Wizard refused for reasons of her own to try and find out what had gone wrong;
then PТRythan, recently Lord of the House of November, was forced to a choice
she despised.
In truth she had no options. Though the universe is a dangerous place, the House
of November is not prone to overreacting; but the Luciferean System, which
contains November, is tunneled to Eloise, and Eloise is tunneled to Devnet; and
danger only two Gates away was danger the House of November could not tolerate.
Had she been younger, or held a different post, PТRythan might have gone
herself; she was a woman of considerable talents. But she was also Lord of the
House of November; and so, for only the sixth time since 2294, when it assumed
control of the planet whose name it shared, the House of November sought outside
aide. PТRythan November sent an envoy to Sol, to Earth, to America, to
California, to the city of Van Nuys, to the headquarters of a certain ancient
organization; and there a Captain of the November Guard presented PТRythanТs
request for the aid of Pinkerton Agent Bodhisatva.

In a time when some of the living had once been machines, and some machines had
once lived, where the body a being wore might not have been the sex or the
species it was born to, it was known that Bodhisatva was a man in the old style;
born human, male, genetically unreconstructed. He was of slightly below average
height by modern standards; his eyes and skin were brown and his hair was black
and it was said he could not change the color of any of them without help from
dyes or lenses.
Some things were general knowledge; the Source would tell you, if you asked it.
It was known that Bodhi had never had biosculpture; and that, though he
maintained a form lean and muscular in the modern style, the maintenance took
him an hour a day working out in high gee on the gravity jungle aboard his ship.
There were a dozen fine immune management nanosystems Bodhi could have had
installed that would have taken over the job of maintaining his muscles for him;
but Bodhi, as he had explained in a rare public statement forty years prior, did
not trust such systems and saw no reason to deprive himself of workouts he
enjoyed.
It was assumed that he ran one of the better defensive immune systems; in his
line of work it would be critical. But no one really knew.