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

Wendel made up his mind: he would go after his dad. He leaned forward, pressed
fingers against the navel, thinking of A Pentagon sliding up over the warped neck that led to
sphere of extra space. His hands looked warped, as if they were underwater. They tingle
not unpleasantly. He pushed his arms in after and then, with a last big breath of air, his h
How would it feel to stop breathing?
It was a while till Wendel came back to that question. The first feeling of being inside
pocket was one of fallingтАФbut this was just an illusion, he was floating, not falling, and he
an odd, dreamlike ability to move in whatever direction he wanted to, not that the mo
seemed to mean much.
There was a dim light that came from everywhere and nowhere. Spread out around
were little mirror-Wendels, all turning their heads this way and that, gestu
andтАФyesтАФnone of them breathing. It was like flying underwater and never being out of br
like being part of a school of fish. The space was patterned with veils of color like seawee
water. Seeing the veils pass he could tell that he was moving, and as the veils repe
themselves he could see that he was moving in a great circle. He was like A Pentagon circ
around and around his bulged-up puffball of space. But where was Dad? He changed the a
of his motion, peering around for distinctions in the drifting school of mirror-shapes.
The motion felt like flying, now, with a wind whipping his hair, and he found a
direction in which the space veils seemed to curve like gossamer chambers of mother-of-p
sketching a sort of nautilus-spiral into the distance. Looking into that distance, that twi
infinity, and feeling the volume of sheer potentiality, he felt the first real wave of bubble-r
His fatigue evaporated in the searing light of the rush, a rippling, bone-deep pleasure
seemed generated by his flying motion into the spiral of the pocket.
"Whuh-oaaaah . . . ," he murmured, afraid of the feeling and yet liking it. So this was
Dad came here. Or one of the reasons. There was something else, too . . . something Dad n
quite articulated.
The bubble-rush was so all-consuming, so shimmeringly insistent, he felt he couldn't be
It was simply too much; too much pleasure and you lost all sense of self; and then it
finally, no better than pain.
Wendel thought, "Stop!" and his motion responded to his will. He stopped where
wasтАФan inertialess stop partway into the receding nautilus-spiral. The bubble-
receded a bit, damped back down to a pleasing background glow.
"Dad!" he yelled. No response. "Dad!" His voice didn't echo; he couldn't tell how lo
was. There was air in here to be sucked in and expelled for speaking. But when he w
yelling, he felt no need to take a breath. Like a vampire in his grave.
He tried to get some kind of grasp of the shape of this place. He thought with an ugly fri
of fear:
Maybe I'm already lost. How do I find my way back out?
Could A Pentagon slide back out the neck into the ball? Or would he have to wait fo
ball to burn out its energy and flatten back into space?
There were no images of Wendel up ahead, where the patterns of the space see
to twirl like a nautilus. It must be a tunnel. If pockets were dangerous, the tunnels f
pocket to pocket were said to be much worse. But he knew that's where Dad had gone.
He moved into the tunnel, flying at will.
The pattern haze ahead of him took on flecks of pink, human color. Someone else was d
there. "Dad?"
He leaned into his flyingтАФand stopped, about ten yards short of the man. It wasn't Dad.
man was bearded, emaciated, sallow . . . which Dad could be, by now, in the time-bent byw
of this place. But it wasn't his dad, it was a stranger, a man with big, scared eyes and a grin
looked permanently fixed. No teeth: barren gums. The man sitting was floating in fetal posi