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

Peabody poured more tea and watched some kayakers put out to
sea for an evening run.
He was, he had to admit, depressed. It seemed to him that none
of this wonderful convergence of information would ever be used
beyond making everyone physically comfortable. Nanotechnology
had a way of satisfying people so that they no longer dreamed. That
was his opinion. Its dourness frightened him.
In earlier days, people had flooded into the city, drawn by the
Norleans Plague. The scientific community thrived.
But few new scientists took the place of older ones. Perhaps there
was some tiny balance-shifting factor about the city that led
children to be interested in the biosciencesтАФsea-farming, the
challenges of growing fruits and vegetables in this isolated
spaceтАФmuch more than physics and mathematics. Their world was
turned inward, toward the small, as they deciphered the riddle of
matter and bid it do their will.
Perhaps the pool was not large enough, here, to produce
philosophers of science, those to whom light and its great riddles
were of supreme importance. There had been no new scientific
revolutions here for years, though every once in a while there were
mutterings of breakthroughs on some distant mainland or other,
and lately a bit of excitement when the supercollider project, which
ringed the city like a vast doughnut about a hundred feet above sea
level, was completed and experiments begun. Though the city had
survived several Category Five hurricanes, storms had wrecked
previous supercollider attempts. This design, completed and
implemented by the Consilience, was supposed to be an
improvement. Peabody was eager to see results, which might show
them a new avenue in the quest to decipher the mysteries of light.
Peabody saw everything in terms of light. His hand as he held his
tea gripped light solidified, and he stood in no special place in space.
This island Earth was just as empty and vibrating within its atoms
and the bonds they formed with one another as any other place in
any universe, though perhaps a shade more dense. The only thing
that made this place special was his own consciousness, his own
glance.
This was the major puzzle to him.
This, and trying to figure out what had happened to radio.
He knew there were others out there who, like him, were trying
to put together a new network of broadcasting protocol. But any
connections fell apart too rapidly to be depended upon.
Many, including Peabody, believed that El Silencio , and its
disasterous effects, were the result of deliberate intelligent
manipulation of EarthтАЩs atmosphere by some distant forceтАФmostly
because the sequence of pulses, the Signal, which had since washed
Earth seemed to have some kind of order.
This source presumably had an understanding of the nature of
light which far surpassed that of humans. Peabody had devoted his
life to deriving an equation distilling the revelations into human
mathematics. His good friend Zeb Aberly, a radio astronomer, was