"Rusch-WithoutEnd" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

"It didn't go well, then," he said, sitting on the deck chair beside her.

She tilted her hat up, revealing her green eyes. They shone in the sun. "Depends
on your point of view. If they accepted me, I probably wasn't on enough of an
edge."

He didn't know how to respond. He was secretly relieved that she hadn't gotten
the post-doc. MIT was an excellent school, and an even better research facility,
but she would have been in Boston, and he would have been in Oregon. Together
only on breaks and during term's end.

"Did you ever think of working on your theories on your own time?" he asked.

"And give those stupid committees the pap that they want ?" She sat up then, and
whipped her hat off her head, letting her black hair cascade around her
shoulders. "You ever think of becoming a Baptist?"

"Geneva, it's not the same."

"It is too the same. People become arbiters of thought. In your area, the church
still holds. In mine, it's the universities. This is an accepted area of
research. That is not. Scientists are children, Dylan, little precious children,
who look at the world as if it is brand new--because it is brand new to them.
And they ask silly questions, and expect cosmic answers, and when the answers
don't come, they go searching. And if they can't ask the silly questions, if
they get slapped every time they do, their searches get smaller, their
discoveries get smaller, and the world becomes a ridiculous, narrow place."

She plopped her hat back on her head, swung her tanned legs off the deck chair
and stood up. "I can make you come without even touching you. Just the power of
our minds, working together. Imagine if the right combination of minds, working
together, break through the boundaries that hold us in our place in the
universe. We might be able to see the Big Bang at the same moment we see the
universe's end. We might be able to see the moment of our birth, this moment,
and every other moment of our lives. We would live differently. We would be
different -- more than human, maybe even better than human."

Her cheeks were flushed. He wanted to touch her, but he knew better.

"It's steam engine time, that's all it is," she said. "A handful of minds,
working together, change our perception of the world. Does a tree falling
unobserved in the forest make a sound? Only if we believe that a tree is a tree,
the ground is the ground, and a sound a vibration. Only if we believe together."

"And someone who doesn't believe gets denied a post-doc," he said.

"It's the twentieth century equivalent of being forced to drink hemlock," she
said, and flounced into the house.