"Rudy Rucker & John Shirley - Pockets" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

"Oops, my boss is chiming hysterically at me. Bye!"
"UmтАФwait." He turned to glance at the dull silvery bubble, already bouncing back from
minimum size, but when he turned back, Manda Solomon was gone and it was only the sn
sunset again. "Shit."
He went to the bubble and kicked it angrily. He couldn't feel anything but "stop," with
sneaker on. It wasn't like kicking an object, it was like something stopped you, turned you
toward your own time flow. Just "stopness." It was saying "no" with the stuff of forever it
There was no way to look inside it: Once someone crawled in through a pocket's nave
sealed up all over.
He turned away, heard somethingтАФand when he looked back the pocket was gone
his dad, stinking and retching and raggedly bearded, was crawling toward him acros
carpet.

Next morning, it seemed to Wendel that his dad sucked the soup down more noisily, m
sloppily, than ever before. His hands shook and he spilled soup on the blankets.
His dad was supposedly fortyтАФbut he looked fifty-five. He'd spent maybe fifteen yea
the pocketsтАФadding up to only a few weeks in outside time, ten minutes here and two h
there and so on.
Dad sat up in his bed, staring out to the bay, sloppily drinking the soup from a bowl,
Wendel had to look away. Sitting at the breakfast bar that divided the kitchenette from the
of the room, he found himself staring at the pile of dirty clothes in the corner. They ne
some kind of hamper, and he could go to some Martinez garage sale and find one next to
But that was something Dad ought to do; Wendel sensed that if he started doing that so
thing, parental things, his dad would give a silent gasp of relief and lean on him, more
more; and paradoxically fall away from him, into the pockets.
"I was gone likeтАФten minutes world-time?" said Dad. "I don't suppose I missed anyt
here in this . . . this teeming hive of activity."
"Ten minutes?" said Wendel. He snorted. "You're still gone, Dad. And, yes, there was a
for you. A woman from Endless Media. Manda Solomon. She left her number and a picture
"Manda?" said Dad. "That flake? Did you tell her I was in a pocket?"
"Right," said Wendel contemptuously. "Like I told her my dad's a pocket-slug."
Dad opened his mouth like he was going to protest the disrespectтАФ then thought better
He shrugged, with as much cool as he could manage. "Manda's down with pockets, Wen
Half the guys programming virtual physics for MetaMeta were using them when I was th
Pockets are a great way to make a deadline. The MetaMeta crunch-room was like a little
of chrome puffballs. Green carpeting, you wave? Manda used to walk around setting sodas
pizzas down outside the pockets. We'd work in there for days, when it was minutes on
outsideтАФget a real edge on the other programmers. She was just a support tech then. We ca
her Fairy Princess and we crunchers were the Toads of the Short Forest, popping ou
loaded on the bubble-rush. Manda's gone down in the world, what I heard, in terms of who
works forтАФ"
"She's a project manager. Better than a support tech."
"Nice of her to think of me." Dad made a little grimace. "Endless Media's about one
past being a virtu-porn Webble. Where's the picture she sent?"
"I saved it in the iTV," said Wendel, and pushed the buttons to show it.
Dad made a groaning sound. "Turn it off, Wendel. Put it away."
"Tell me what it is, first," said Wendel, pressing the controller buttons to zoom in on
faces. It was definitelyтАФ
"Mom and me," said Dad shakily. "I took that photo the week before she died." His v
became almost inaudible. "Yeah. You can see . . . some of the images are different further