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

planning for the supercollider. They had taken to calling it Science
Hall. In its heyday, the atmosphere had been that of PrincetonтАЩs
Institute of Advanced Thinking, where at any one time you might
find mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and others in heated
conversations or engaged in Consilience-aided projects.
He pulled open the heavy, arched wooden door. Much of Crescent
City was made of ultralight, ultrastrong buckyball material,
material that responded quickly, although within preset
parameters, to requests for change. But in some places people had
chosen the comfort of well-remembered materials.
He stepped inside, and low lights illiminated the room.
Comfortable clublike couches faced one another in
conversation-friendly groups, but other chairs were placed at work
stations at which one could access various levels of the Consilience.
Rattan rugs were scattered across the floor. Several cocoons
provided access to complete immersion in the Consilience, which
Peabody tended to avoid because the process involved a certain loss
of control.
For a moment he saw the room filled with his old friends,
colleagues with whom he had spent months and years in close
work. Many, like the radio astronomer, had left Crescent
CityтАФfrustrated; eager to see what was happening elsewhere.
He sat and recorded his experience with the light, and gave it to
the Consilience.
It was just a brief note. He regretted that he could say nothing
concrete about its spectrum. All of its brilliance and intensity
seemed now to have been, possibly, an illusion.
The loneliness of the room brought back his feelings of futility.
He had expected others to be here. Had this only happened to him?
Had he imagined it?
He left.
On the thirteenth level, he walked through a jungle which by day
was thick with cockatoos, parakeets, talking parrots, and the rebel
parrots, who disdained human manipulation and reverted to
natural form and tried to convince the other parrots to do so as
well.
He tried to see if his friend, a white philosopher-parrot, was
among them. She had lived in the tower for three years. Taught a
wide vocabulary from birth, she had been especially eloquent when
pontificating on Gaia. Eventually, she acquired the
parrot-developed imaging grammar displayed on the beaks of those
who chose that option, and elected to grow receptors, on her claws,
which allowed her to access the Consilience. Not long after that, she
suddenly moved down here. But he did not see her.
He heard the chatter and shrieks of a distant band of monkeys,
perhaps awakened by some intrusion, and the muted roar of a
waterfall. He passed a food pavilion, open twenty-four hours a day;
he was not the only person who preferred the night.
The smell of garlic conjured a memory: a small Italian restaurant
where he and his wife often dined when he was the Chief Nanotech