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

another like himself, focused on this mystery. But he had left
Crescent City years ago.
PeabodyтАЩs own life might have meant something if such answers
had ever been found. Perhaps the answer, the closure, for him and
for others in his situation, had been prepared but not sent, or had
been sent and missed its target.
As he looked out over Crescent City, he succumbed to darkening
intimations which all the fairylike lights of the world beneath him,
now appearing as the tropical night closed down suddenly, could not
brighten.
It was possible that his life with all its pain and loss was only the
result of a question posed in light, and that somewhere out there
those who had caused this havoc awaited their answer, the answer
he had tried to formulate through a lifetime of observation, study,
and puzzle-solving.
Or perhaps it was one huge improvisation and an important
musician had left the stage and the tune had changed, far out there
in interstellar space, leaving Earth crippled forever.
The human brain, having evolved to deal with certain
environmental factors, might simply be unable to fathom the
universe in the way that it so desperately wanted to. It was
impossible for one mind to hold within it the entire knowledge of
what humanity had discovered over the course of its scientific
history. Peabody hoped therefore that the Consilience, which was
nonhuman and therefore perhaps not as limited, was using that
information to study possible new trajectories regarding solving the
most pressing question of the age: What was causing the Silence,
and how could it be stopped?
Or used.
Whether or not the city was conscious was often debated, but it
did indeed act like a living organism, keeping itself and its denizens
functioning as if the humans and animals were beneficial bacterium
along for the ride.
Something held him in the city, but he could no longer say what,
except that the city itself seemed to want him here. This was an
unusual thought for a man long given to practicalities, but the idea
that a system as large as this city might have a will of its own was
not at all extreme. Perhaps it was wise enough to be frightened of
its supposed fate of maturing into a spacefaring entity. Perhaps it
was thinking things over, trying to figure out a way to leave the
humans, demanding as a raft of kittens suckling an exhausted
mother, behind.
If it was conscious, perhaps it was also wise, for it kept any such
realization to itself.
The black cat on his couch stretched and yawned. Peabody picked
up a stray image from him, a burst of metapheromones which
manifested as a few lines and colors on the back of his hand.
This was another of his failures. Many islanders made it their
lifeтАЩs work to try to communicate with animals using all kinds of
methods, but Peabody, though interested, had never been able to