Robert Charles Wilson - Darwinia

VIP免费

2024-12-03 0 0 655.42KB 354 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Darwinia

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Wilson,%20Robert%20Charles%20-%20Darwinia.html (1 of 354)8-12-2006 23:42:18

Darwinia

Robert Charles Wilson

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Wilson,%20Robert%20Charles%20-%20Darwinia.html (2 of 354)8-12-2006 23:42:18

Darwinia

E-Book Version: 1.0

Last Updated: 25 July 2002

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Wilson,%20Robert%20Charles%20-%20Darwinia.html (3 of 354)8-12-2006 23:42:18

Darwinia
Table of Contents:
●     Prologue 
●     Book One: Spring, Summer 1920 
❍     Chapter One 
❍     Chapter Two 
❍     Chapter Three 
❍     Chapter Four 
❍     Chapter Five 
❍     Chapter Six 
❍     Chapter Seven 
❍     Chapter Eight 
❍     Chapter Nine 
❍     Chapter Ten 
❍     Chapter Eleven 
❍     Chapter Twelve 
❍     Chapter Thirteen 
❍     Chapter Fourteen 
●     Interlude 
●     Book Two: Winter, Spring 1920-1921 
❍     Chapter Fifteen 
❍     Chapter Sixteen 
❍     Chapter Seventeen 
❍     Chapter Eighteen 
❍     Chapter Nineteen 
❍     Chapter Twenty 
❍     Chapter Twenty-One 
❍     Chapter Twenty-Two 
❍     Chapter Twenty-Three 
❍     Chapter Twenty-Four 
❍     Chapter Twenty-Five 
●     Interlude 
●     Book Three: July 1945 
❍     Chapter Twenty-Six 
❍     Chapter Twenty-Seven 
❍     Chapter Twenty-Eight 
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Wilson,%20Robert%20Charles%20-%20Darwinia.html (4 of 354)8-12-2006 23:42:18

Darwinia
❍     Chapter Twenty-Nine 
❍     Chapter Thirty 
❍     Chapter Thirty-One 
●     Interlude 
●     Book Four: Autumn 1965 
❍     Chapter Thirty-Two 
❍     Chapter Thirty-Three 
❍     Chapter Thirty-Four 
❍     Chapter Thirty-Five 
❍     Chapter Thirty-Six 
❍     Chapter Thirty-Seven 
❍     Chapter Thirty-Eight 
❍     Chapter Thirty-Nine 
❍     Chapter Forty 
●     Interlude 
●     Epilogue 
Up | Book One 
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Wilson,%20Robert%20Charles%20-%20Darwinia.html (5 of 354)8-12-2006 23:42:18

Darwinia

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Wilson,%20Robert%20Charles%20-%20Darwinia.html (6 of 354)8-12-2006 23:42:18

Darwinia

Prologue

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Wilson,%20Robert%20Charles%20-%20Darwinia.html (7 of 354)8-12-2006 23:42:18

Darwinia

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Wilson,%20Robert%20Charles%20-%20Darwinia.html (8 of 354)8-12-2006 23:42:18

Darwinia

1912: MARCH

Guilford Law turned fourteen the night the world changed.

It was the watershed of historical time, the night that divided all that followed from everything that went

before, but before it was any of that, it was only his birthday. A Saturday in March, cold, under a

cloudless sky as deep as a winter pond. He spent the afternoon rolling hoops with his older brother,

breathing ribbons of steam into the raw air.

His mother served pork and beans for dinner, Guilford's favorite. The casserole had simmered all day in

the oven and filled the kitchen with the sweet incense of ginger and molasses. There had been a birthday

present, a bound, blank book in which to draw his pictures. And a new sweater, navy blue, adult.

Guilford had been born in 1898; born, almost, with the century. He was the youngest of three. More than

his brother, more than his sister, Guilford belonged to what his parents still called "the new century." It

wasn't new to him. He had lived in it almost all his life. He knew how electricity worked. He even

understood radio. He was a twentieth-century person, privately scornful of the dusty past, the gaslight

and mothball past. On the rare occasions when Guilford had money in his pocket he would buy a copy

of Modern Electrics and read it until the pages worked loose from the spine.

The family lived in a modest Boston town house. His Father was a typesetter in the city. His grandfather,

who lived in the upstairs room next to the attic stairs, had fought in the Civil War with the 13th

Massachusetts. Guilford's mother cooked, cleaned, budgeted, and grew tomatoes and string beans in the

tiny back garden. His brother, everyone said, would one day be a doctor or a lawyer. His sister was thin

and quiet and read Robert Chambers novels, of which his father disapproved.

It was past Guilford's bedtime when the sky grew very bright, but he had been allowed to stay up as part

of the general mood of indulgence, or simply because he was older now. Guilford didn't understand what

was happening when his brother called everyone to the window, and when they all rushed out the

kitchen door, even his grandfather, to stand gazing at the night sky,he thought at first this excitement had

something to do with his birthday. The idea was wrong, he knew, but so concise. His birthday. The

sheets of rainbow light above his house. All of the eastern sky was alight. Maybe something was

burning, he thought. Something far off at sea.

"It's like the aurora," his mother said, her voice hushed and uncertain.

It was an aurora that shimmered like a curtain in a slow wind and cast subtle shadows over the

whitewashed fence and the winter-brown garden. The great wall of light, now green as bottle glass, now

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Wilson,%20Robert%20Charles%20-%20Darwinia.html (9 of 354)8-12-2006 23:42:18

Darwinia

blue as the evening sea, made no sound. It was as soundless as Halley's Comet had been, two years ago.

His mother must have been thinking of the Comet, too, because she said the same thing she'd said back

then. "It seems like the end of the world…."

Why did she say that? Why did she twist her hands together and shield her eyes? Guilford, secretly

delighted, didn't think it was the end of the world. His heart beat like a clock, keeping secret time.

Maybe it was the beginning of something. Not a world ending but a new world beginning. Like the turn

of a century, he thought.

Guilford didn't fear what was new. The sky didn't frighten him. He believed in science, which

(according to the magazines) was unveiling all the mysteries of nature, eroding mankind's ancient

ignorance with its patient and persistent questions. Guilford thought he knew what science was. It was

nothing more than curiosity…tempered by humility, disciplined with patience.

Science meant looking—a special kind of looking. Looking especially hard at the things you didn't

understand. Looking at the stars, say, and not fearing them, not worshiping them, just asking questions,

finding the question that would unlock the door to the next question and the question beyond that.

Unafraid, Guilford sat on the crumbling back steps while the others went inside to huddle in the parlor.

For a moment he was happily alone, warm enough in his new sweater, the steam of his breath twining up

into the breathless radiance of the sky.

Later—in the months, the years, the century of aftermath—countless analogies would be drawn. The

Flood, Armageddon, the extinction of the dinosaurs. But the event itself, the terrible knowledge of it and

the diffusion of that knowledge across what remained of the human world, lacked parallel or precedent.

In 1877 the astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had mapped the canals of Mars. For decades afterward his

maps were duplicated and refined and accepted as fact, until better lenses proved the canals were an

illusion, unless Mars itself had changed since then: hardly unthinkable, in light of what happened to the

Earth. Perhaps something had twined through the solar system like a thread borne on a breath of air,

something ephemeral but unthinkably immense, touching the cold worlds of the outer solar system,

moving through rock, ice, frozen mantle, lifeless geologies. Changing what it touched. Moving toward

the Earth.

The sky had been full of signs and omens. In 1907, the Tunguska fireball. In 1910, Halley's Comet.

Some, like Guilford Law's mother, thought it was the end of the world. Even then.

The sky that March night was brighter over the northeastern reaches of the Atlantic Ocean than it had

been during the Comet's visit. For hours, the horizon flared with blue and violet light. The light,

witnesses said, was like a wall. It fell from the zenith. It divided the waters. It was visible from

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Wilson,%20Robert%20Charles%20-%20Darwinia.html (10 of 354)8-12-2006 23:42:18

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

DarwiniaDarwiniafile:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Wilson,%20Robert%20Charles%20-%20Darwinia.html(1of354)8-12-200623:42:18DarwiniaRobertCharlesWilsonfile:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Wilson,%20Robert%20Charles%20-%20Darwinia.html(2of354)8-12-200623:42:18DarwiniaE-BookVersion:1.0LastUpdated:25July2002file:///K|/eMu...

展开>> 收起<<

Robert Charles Wilson - Darwinia.pdf

共354页,预览10页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Robert Charles Wilson - Darwinia

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: