"Kathleen Ann Goonan - Nanotech 04 - Light Music" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goose Mother)

fabricated land, roughened. Peabody watched a white sail furl.
Crescent City, afloat in the Caribbean Sea, grew on acres of
artificial land, its sweeping, tentlike lines reaching an apex just
above his windows.
On the other side of his tower, the vast bulk of the city stretched
out so far that he could not see the end of it, and was home to about
one million people and perhaps half as many modified animals. It
was quickly obscured by the deluge.
There was within the city, Peabody knew, an impulse to
metamorph into a space city, for that had been the original design.
Crescent City had been created to be an environment where
humanity could learn complete self-sufficiency, and invent
technologies which would propel and support them in space. The
spacefaring vision of its founder had been long in maturing, for it
lacked several vital featuresтАФone of them being a destination, and,
at least now, sufficient reason to leave. It had been growing for
about seventy-five years, and Peabody had lived here for the past
forty years as the anonymous Engineer.
He had been born at the very end of the age of broadcasting.
Scientific advances in physics, genetics, biology, and chemistry
resulted in technological wonders that promised to turn humans
into a new species and send them to the stars. Radios and
telephones and the Internet accompanied people everywhere, like a
new human sense, forming a new mind that spanned the planet.
When Peabody was born, this mind began to shatter. By the time
he was an adolescent, it was gone. Radio communication became
sporadic and undependable.
Crescent City had been established, in part, to preserve
information and further science and learning. Those not born here
were refugees from a world blasted back to varying levels of
civilization by a mysterious Signal from space which had been
washing Earth for just over a hundred years now, creating the
radio vacuum called, in Crescent City, El Silencio .
Life was salubrious in the vast tropical gardens, on the sheltered
beaches and bays, where the best of all that nanotech had to offer
enhanced the intelligence and health of the city dwellers. Since
there were no private possessions there was nothing to steal. If
desired, a citizen could form any style of clothing, any type of
furniture, any kind of material possession. When she was tired of it,
she could leave it for others, or return it to the matter bank. OneтАЩs
personal territory was small, but most of life was lived in public
plazas.
As the population grew, the city itself grew, establishing more
pavilions, and building more land via electrostatic webs that
catalyzed minerals from seawater.
Growth of new land was a slow process. In the past few decades
it had been necessary to establish a waiting list for admittance into
the city. Several factions had attempted to grow floating cities in
other locations, but Crescent City had been established during the
first phase of El Silencio , when all the wealth, know-how, and