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

make sense of their thoughts. Images did not dance across the
EngineerтАЩs skin because his personal symbolic language remained
locked within his brain. He was not able to allow it to be translated
for the world to see.
His only company, for years, had been a a series of cats. They
wandered into the tower one at a time and took up residence, lying
striped with bands of light on the cool tiled floor, as if they had
some sort of pact to keep him distant company.
Peabody did, however, feel a kinship with the elephant that lived
on the new pavilion about two miles to the west. He traveled to see
it every once in a while, traversing a city almost alien to him via a
system of sidewalks which moved through lush orchid-laden jungle
where children played without fear of other humans or of venomous
creatures. In fact, it was a bit scary how free of fear they were.
It was now full night. Able to see a cosmos no longer occluded by
the sun, he was finally awake. Lights and dials winked around him
in a waist-high stratum banding the small room. The floor carried,
like most of the surfaces of the city, a powerfully sophisticated and
complex hypertextual information system. Peabody generally had it
manifest a map of the world, with tiny glowing lights depicting the
sources and types of radio signals he had picked up.
His roofтАЩs daylight opacity deserted it, no longer necessary,
allowing starstreaked space to fill his mind. He kept the Radio
Room dark except for the glow of frequency readouts, which danced
through his nights in cadences that suggested something
frustratingly out of his ability to understand or to know.
He settled into sampling the signals, hearing the brief thrilling
blips from clear-channel stations that had broadcast automatically
for almost a century while rarely riding the atmosphere for long.
He felt the slight, dreamy sway of the tower in the wind and
watched the dim luminosity of Crescent City grow. His hand, as he
reached out to quickly twist a dial, was resolutely middle-aged in
appearanceтАФthe hand of, perhaps, a fifty-year-old, though an
exceedingly fit and healthy fifty-year-old. He did not wish to chance
the change of younger renewal, for he had seen too many people
become younger in mind as well as appearance during the various
processes which brought the body the freshness of youth. As it was,
he had still cheated age by fifty years or more. He supposed that
effect was part of a present given him long ago by a lover.
He noticed lights on the horizonтАФmost likely, their fishing fleet
returning. He drank several cups of tea.
Sometimes, lately, Paris had skipped into range for as long as a
minute at a time, with throaty singing or, more interestingly, some
kind of code. He knew that Paris was a huge antenna, and that it
had for many years devoted much energy to enlarging this antenna.
Suddenly, static hissed from one of his speakers.
He moved toward it eagerly as it focused into brilliant, organized
sound. The scope of the sound expanded instantly and fused with
the map of the radio sky which he had carried in his mind since
young, its unseen dimensions picked up by senses few other