"Paul Di Filippo - The Reluctant Book" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

himself
a scholar, and boasted a scholar's unswerving dedication to the pursuit
of
knowledge above all else. And in truth, out of his well-stocked,
heavily
permuted, and continually refreshed library had flowed some original
contributions in a number of fields: stellar intelligence;
gravitokarmic
mechanics; intractability parsing; asteroidal archaeology; quantum
erotogenics; string collecting; creative teratogenesis; and even those
 neglected twin domains, once upon a time so creatively mined, fiction
and
poetry. Holbrook had seen a number of successes, receiving invitations
from various ahuman judging intelligences to port his findings out of
his
books and into the relevant cybernetic audiovisual datawebs that formed
the real repositories of useful information in Holbrook's era.
But deriving all these entertaining and educational results from his
books
was an arduous and demanding task, admitting of little nonbookish
relaxation or convivial pursuits even with fellow MBs. His hobby was
conducive even to monomania, perhaps, and Holbrook had paid the
ultimate
price for his interests.
And soon now, so would his books.

MB Kratchko Stallkamp resembled a constitutionally ill-tempered, mangy
crane recently denied its dinner. Stalky legs encased in yellow
pipestem
pantaloons; a roundish torso fluffed out with a weskin of synthetic
quills
fashionable over fifty years ago; hunched winglike shoulders and
perpetually scrunched-down head resulting in ears nearly on a level
with
his Order of the Bookbinders epaulets; and a beaky nose and hard eyes
intent on the main chance of spearing something. The wispy hair
partially
concealing his scabby scalp anomalously evoked the downy plumage of a
chick. As if his avian semblance were not offputting enough, antique
eyeglasses retrofitted with intelligent actilenses lent Stallkamp the
impossible air of a goggling time-traveler from the Reductionist
Millennia.
Ushered from the wintry collonaded front porch into the cold corridors
of
Rueulroald by a gimpy Turing-five factotum (one of the few functioning
servants left on the estate, an antique whom Holbrook had chosen
perversely to address as "The Venerable Bede"), Stallkamp clutched to
his
quilled chest, as if suspicious of imminent theft, a battered leather
case