"Alastair Reynolds - Beyond the Aquila Rift" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

Beyond the Aquila Rift
ALASTASR REYNOLDS
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)

Alastair Reynolds (www.members.tripod.com/~voxishj lives in Noordwijk, Holland, and worked for
ten years for the European Space Agency before becoming a full-time writer in 2004. He is one of
the new British space opera writers to emerge in the mid and late 1990s, in the generation after
Baxter and McAuley, and originally the most "hard SF" of them. His first novel, Revelation Space,
was published in 1999. He is growing fast as an SF writer in this decade. His last two novels are
Century Rain and Pushing Ice. His first short story collection, Galactic North, collecting pieces in the
RS universe, is out in 2006.

"Beyond the Aquila Rift" was published in Constellations. There is an echo of Philip K. Dick's
classic, "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts." A ship is marooned outside the galaxy by an
alien wormhole transportation system that everyone uses but no one really understands. Reality is
not what it appears to be.

Greta's with me when I pull Suzy out of the surge tank.

"Why her?" Greta asks.

"Because I want her out first," I say, wondering if Greta's jealous. I don't blame her: Suzy's
beautiful, but she's also smart. There isn't a better syntax runner in Ashanti Industrial.

"What happened? " Suzy asks, when she's over the groggi-ness. "Did we make it back?"

I ask her to tell me the last thing she remembered.

"Customs," Suzy says. "Those pricks on Arkangel."

"And after that? Anything else? The runes? Do you remember casting them?"

"No," she says, then picks up something in my voice. The fact that I might not be telling the truth,
or telling her all she needs to know. "Thorn. I'll ask you again. Did we make it back?"

"Yeah," I say. "We made it back."

Suzy looks back at the starscape, airbrushed across her surge tank in luminous violet and yellow
paint. She 'd had it customized on Carillon. It was against regs: something about the paint
clogging intake filters. Suzy didn't care. She told me it had cost her a week's pay, but it had been
worth it to impose her own personality on the gray company architecture of the ship.

"Funny how I feel like I've been in that thing for months."

I shrug. "That's the way it feels sometimes."
"Then nothing went wrong?"
"Nothing at all."

Suzy looks at Greta. "Then who are you?" she asks.
Greta says nothing. She just looks at me expectantly. I start shaking, and realize I can't go