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

support of a still-extant civilization spurred its growth. Now such
an endeavor would be more difficult. Peabody did not know if any
other cities had suceeded, though he fervently hoped that they had.
Children occasionally dropped by his tower to learn of the
wonders of radio, which still sputtered to life after the glow of
sunset left the horizon, its brief transmissions captured by Peabody
and added to decades of similar information. Towers throughout the
world still transmitted, but El Silencio disrupted the waves.
Occasionally, pulses of energy swept through space in what had so
far proven to be a nonrepeating pattern.
Peabody himself went on the air almost every night from four to
five in the morning, or longer if he felt like it, but lately he had
found himself with little to say and played some of the
multicultural synthesis music that had a way of changing overnight
in the style-conscious hothouse of the city.
He could not say that the city had failed.
But humanity, perhaps, had failed the cityтАФthe idea of the city.
It sometimes seemed that he was the only person here who still
wondered why radio no longer functioned predictably.
His own mind held a map of the stars, formulated through
painful developmental stages during which his corpus colossi had
grown larger than that of most people. This curious map was also
present in the minds of many children conceived the same day as
Peabody. For much of his life, he had tried to forget that it was
there. The process of its acquisition, as unsought and as unwanted
as a cancer, had been unpleasant.
 He and others like himself had been sought for study by the
government, who linked their existence to the Silence; his early life
had been marred by the constant need to hide from those trying to
find him.
Indeed, there was a link. Developmental spurts, generally
accompanied by intense, unbearable headaches, bore the same
temporal pattern as the pulses. It amazed him that many children
here, when they reached the age of majority, actually chose this
modification, as if it were a rite of passage.
All of that information, including the star maps, were a part of
the Consilience, as was other navigational information, developed
by NASA, which he had stolen from Johnson Space Center in
Houston when he was young.
Any individual in Crescent City could enter the Consilience, an
informational stratum of the city where all of the scientific and
mathematical information which made its way hereтАФindeed, all
information, no matter how seemingly mundaneтАФwas united by
the city itself. The Consilience was accessible through a huge
variety of interfaces.
The sun blazed briefly after the rain, an orange tongue which the
blue sea swallowed. The windows thinned and a welcome cool
breeze swept across the small living area, which contained a couch,
a chair, a futon alcove, and an abbreviated kitchen which included a
beer tap.