Aksanomoon: переводы

→When the meeting began at A+0.0.4 (zero years, zero days, and four hours since the Agent had acted upon the moon), nothing was working, and so the occupants of Izzy had a few minutes to talk among themselves while Frank Casper and Jibran Haroun wiggled connectors, typed commands into computers, and rebooted everything.

→Relatively new arrivals to Izzy, Frank and Jibran had made the mistake of letting on that they were good at that sort of thing, so they always got saddled with it. Both of them were more comfortable with it anyway than with making chitchat.

→***

→And Doob became one of perhaps a few million people around the dark half of the planet all looking up into the sky, in a state of shock so profound as to shut off the parts of the brain responsible for higher functions like talking.

→He was going back to the bar for another glass of the pinot noir, fully in the Doc Dubois persona, slapping shoulders and bumping fists and exchanging grins, when a man gasped. Everyone looked at him. Doob was afraid that the poor guy had been struck by a stray bullet or something. He was frozen, poised on one leg, gazing up. A woman followed his gaze and screamed.

→He knew that self-made tech zillionaires liked to argue, that Pasadena aristocracy didn’t, and that society wives liked to be lectured to, as long as the lectures were brief and funny. And he knew that his job was to charm these people, nothing more, so that they could later be handed off to professional fund-raisers.

→But that wasn’t what he was doing. He was drinking good red wine with rich persons, mostly from the tech industry, and being Doc Dubois, the affable science popularizer of television and of four million Twitter followers. Doc Dubois knew how to size up his audience.

→Public relations was another matter; operating more in his Doc Dubois persona, he occasionally organized star parties where amateur astronomers would set their telescopes up in Eaton Canyon Park and aim them at crowd-pleasing targets such as the moon, the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter. Tonight would be a fine night for that.

→The moon blew up while he was attending a fund-raising reception in the courtyard of the Caltech Athenaeum. At the beginning of the evening it was a fiercely cold bluish-white disk rising above the Chino Hills. Lay observers would fancy it a good night for moon watching, at least by Southern California standards, but Dr. Harris’s professional eye saw a thin border of fuzz around its rim and knew that aiming a telescope at it would be pointless. At least if the objective were to do science.

→In academic settings, such as when he was keynoting astronomical meetings and writing papers, he was, of course, Dr. Harris.

→The overwhelming majority of people called him Doc Dubois now, because he was on TV a lot, and that was how the talk show hosts and the network anchormen introduced him. His job on TV was to explain science to the general public and, as such, to act as a lightning rod for people who could not accept all the things that science implied about their worldview and their way of life, and who showed a kind of harebrained ingenuity in finding ways to refute it.

→His name was Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris, Ph.D. The French first name came from his Louisiana ancestors on his mother’s side. The Harrises were Canadian blacks whose ancestors had come up to Toronto during slavery. Jerome and Xavier were the names of saints—two of them, just to be on the safe side. The family straddled the border in the Detroit-W indsor area. Inevitably, he had been dubbed Doob by his friends at school when they had still been too young to understand that “doobie” was slang for a marijuana cigarette.

→***

→And then she brought her face close to the window and twisted her neck to find the moon. She saw what used to be it. And the universe changed.

→“Huh?”

→OR WHAT USED TO BE IT

→“Not now, Pa, I know the moon’s pretty, I’m right in the middle of debugging this method . . .”

→LOOK AT THE MOON

→“Not now, Pa,” she muttered, with a guilty daughter’s glance at the brass-and- oak telegraph key he had given her—a Victorian relic purchased at great price on eBay, during a bidding war that had placed Rufus into pitched battle against a host of science museums and interior decorators.

→“Not now, Pa,” she muttered, with a guilty daughter’s glance at the brass-and- oak telegraph key he had given her—a Victorian relic purchased at great price on eBay, during a bidding war that had placed Rufus into pitched battle against a host of science museums and interior decorators.