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

the lattice . . . because our pocket had a tunnel leading to other pockets. That hap
sometimes, you know. It's not a good idea to go down the tunnels. It was the time after this
that. . . Mom didn't come back." He looked at the picture for a moment; like its own pocket
moment seemed to stretch out to a gray forever. Then he looked away. "Turn it off, will yo
brings me down."
Wendel stared at his mother's young face a moment longer, then turned off the im
"You never told me much about the time she didn't come back."
"I don't need to replay the experience, kid."
"Dad. I. . . look, just do it. Tell me."
Dad stared at him. Looked away. Wendel thought he was going to refuse again. T
he shrugged and began, his voice weary. "It was a much bigger pocket than usual," said
almost inaudible. "MetaMeta . . . they'd scored a shitload of them from DeGroot, and we w
merging them together so whole teams could fit in. Using fundamental space-time geom
weirdness to meet the marketing honcho's deadlines, can you believe? I was an idiot to buy
it. And this last time Jena was mad at me, and she flew away from me while we were in th
And then I couldn't tell which of the lattice-nodes was really her. Like a mirror maze
funhouse. And meanwhile I'm all tweaked out of my mind on bubble-rush. But I had my la
harness, and there was all that code-hacking to be done, and I got into it for sure, glancing
at all the Jenas now and then, and they're programming, too, so I thought it was OK, but
..." He swallowed, turning to look out the window, as if he might see her out there in the
"When the pocket flattened back out, I was alone. The same shit was coming down everyw
all of a sudden, and then there was the Big Bubble disaster at the DeGroot plant and al
pocket-bubbles were declared government property and if you want to use them anymore
people, you know ..." His voice trailed into a whisper: ". . . they act like you're a junkie."
"Yeah," said Wendel. "I know." He looked out the window for a while. It was a sunny
but the foulness in the water made the sea a dingy gray, as if it were brooding on
memories. He spotted a couple of little pocket-bubbles floating in on the brackish waves.
had been buying them from beachcombers, merging them together till he got one big enoug
crawl into again.
They'd talked about pockets in Wendel's health class at school last term. In term
dangerous things the grown-ups wanted to warn you away from, pockets were right up t
with needles, drunk driving, and doing it bareback. You could stay inside too long and c
out a couple of years older than your friends. You could lose your youth inside a pocket. O
enough, you didn't eat or breathe in any conventional way while you were inside thereтАФt
parts of your metabolism went into suspension. The pocket-slugs dug this aspect of
highтАФfor after all, weren't eating and breathing just another wearisome world-drag? T
were even rock songs about pockets setting you free from "feeding the pig," as the 'slugs l
to call normal life. You didn't eat or breathe inside a pocket but even so were still ge
older, often a lot faster than you realized. Some people came out, like, middle-aged.
And, of course, some people never came out at all. They died in there of old ag
got killed by a bubble-psychotic pocket-slug coming through a tunnel, orтАФthough this last
sounded like government propagandaтАФyou might tunnel right off into some kind of alien
world. If you found a pocket-bubble, you were supposed to take it straight to
police. As opposed to selling it to a 'slug, or, worse, trying to accumulate enough of them
get a pocket big enough to go into yourself. The word was that it felt really good, b
than drugs or sex or booze. Sometimes Wendel wanted to try itтАФbecause then, maybe,
understand his dad. Other times the thought terrified him.
He looked at his shaky, strung-out father, wishing he could respect him. "Do you keep d
it because you think you might find Mom in there someday?" asked Wendel, his voice plain
in his own ears.