"Connie Willis - At the Rialto" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

John Wayne, Elvis, and Tiffany the model-slash-actress with the brain of a
pea-slash-amoeba."
"Shh," I said.
"тАФthe person we've all been waiting to hear, Dr. Ringgit Dinari."
"What happened to Dr. Onofrio?" I asked.
"Shhh," David said.
Dr. Dinari looked a lot like Dr. Onofrio. She was short, roundish, and
mustached and was wearing a rainbow-striped caftan. "I will be your
guide this evening into a strange new world," she said, "a world where all
that you thought you knew, all common sense, all accepted wisdom, must
be discarded. A world where all the rules have changed and it sometimes
seems there are no rules at all."
She sounded just like Dr. Onofrio, too. He had given this same speech
two years ago in Cincinnati. I wondered if he had undergone some strange
transformation during his search for room 1282 and was now a woman.
"Before I go any further," Dr. Dinari said, "how many of you have
already channeled?"
Newtonian physics had as its model the machine. The metaphor of the
machine, with its interrelated parts, its gears and wheels, its causes and
effects, was what made it possible to think about Newtonian physics.
Excerpt from Dr. Gedanken's keynote address


"You knew we were in the wrong place," I hissed at David when we got
out to the lobby.
When we stood up to leave, Dr. Dinari had extended her pudgy hand in
its rainbow-striped sleeve and called out in a voice a lot like Charlton
Heston's, "O Unbelievers! Leave not, for here only is reality!"
"Actually, channeling would explain a lot," David said, grinning.
"If the opening remarks aren't in the ballroom, where are they?"
"Beats me," he said. "Want to go see the Capitol Records building? It's
shaped like a stack of records."
"I want to go to the opening remarks."
"The beacon on top blinks out 'Hollywood' in Morse code."
I went over to the front desk.
"Can I help you?" the clerk behind the desk said. "My name is Natalie,
and I'm anтАФ"
"Where is the ICQP meeting this evening?" I said.
"They're in the ballroom."
"I'll bet you didn't have any dinner," David said. "I'll buy you an
ice-cream cone. There's this great place that has the ice-cream cone Ryan
O'Neal bought for Tatum in Paper Moon."
"A channeler's in the ballroom," I told Natalie. "I'm looking for the
ICQP."
She fiddled with the computer. "I'm sorry. I don't show a reservation for
them."
"How about Grauman's Chinese?" David said. "You want reality? You
want Charlton Heston? You want to see quantum theory in action?" He
grabbed my hands. "Come with me," he said seriously.
In St. Louis I had suffered a wave-function collapse a lot like what had