"Brin, David - Earth (UC)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

It's surprising the few animals left can find each other amid
the bedlam, to breed.
Excluding Greenland and Antarctica, seventy-nine Tranquility
Reserves were reported in our last roundup. We're now sad
to report that two failed this year's test. At this rate, soon there
will be no terrestrial silence zones left at all.
And our Oceania correspondents report matters growing
worse there, as well. Too many landlubbers seem to be heading
off the standard shipping lanes--vacationers who seek out nature's
serenity, but in so doing bring to silent places the plague
of their own voices.
(And then there is that catastrophe the Sea State, perhaps
better left unmentioned here, lest we despair entirely!)
Even the southern Indian Ocean, Earth's last frontier of solitude,
trembles under the cacophony of our cursed ten billions
and their machines. Frankly, it wouldn't surprise this writer if Gaia eventually had enough, if she awoke from her fitful slumber
EARTH 11
and answered our noise with a shaking such as this tired planet
has never known.
--From the March 2038 edition of The Mother. I D Net access Pl-63-
AA1888667767.]
There are many ways to propagate. (Such a lovely
H word!) This late in her long life, Jen Wolling figured she
0 knew just about all of them.
L Especially where the term applied to biology--to all
0 the varied means Life used to foil its great enemy. Time.
S So many were those ways, Jen sometimes puzzled why
P everyone fussed so over the traditional one, sex.
H True, sex had its points. It helped ensure variability
E in a species--a gambler's game, mixing one's own genes
R with another's, betting that beneficial serendipities will
E outweigh the inevitable errors. In fact, sex had served
most higher life forms well enough and long enough, to
become reinforced with many pleasurable neural and hormonal
responses.
In other days Jen had plumbed those pathways in vivo
and with gusto. She had also mapped those same roads more
precisely, in charts of pristine yet still passionate mathematics.
Hers had been the earliest computer models to show
theoretical bases for feeling, logical rationales for ecstasy,
even theorems for the mysterious art of motherhood.
Two husbands, three children, eight grandchildren, and
one Nobel Prize later, Jen knew motherhood from every angle,
even though its fierce hormonal flows were now only
memories. Ah, well. There were other types of propagation.
Other ways even an old woman might leave an imprint upon
history.
"No, Baby!" she chided, pulling a bright red apple away
from the bars dividing the spacious lab in two. A gray tentacle
waved between the steel rods, snatching at the fruit.