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

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Peabody was suffused with unaccustomed, unanticipated joy.
He also saw the truth of what the city saidтАФimperfectly, as a
child might, but accepting the urgency. If this information was not
retrieved and incorporated, the entire enterprise would fail.
It was like calculating trajectories, or doing any other precise,
motion-dependent work. There was a target. A great change had
washed through the atmosphere, from somewhere . Presaging
something . Even as a plant might put all of its energy into
producing a future flower, though it knew not what it did, or a
human child develop into puberty, there was some kind of cosmic
maturity awaiting them. Some bright awakening.
 Peabody glimpsed the edge of thisтАФthe possibility of it, the deep
workings of its harmonies, of which he, and everything, was a part.
There was no Plan; there was only Event, only constant
emergenceтАФfreeform improvisation, following certain embedded
rules which themselves could change.
Consciousness, its by-product, wanted to flash through all of it.
Wanted to inhabit all of matter.
Suddenly, another terrible blast shook the walls.
The city which had spoken to him vanished. It was dark, and
deadened, as if part of him had suffered a stroke.
He struggled, trapped; tried to shout, but could not even do that.
And then, the enhanced hormonal network embedded within his
biology was hijacked byтАФ
The Westerns. An obscure and obsolete branch of study followed
by a group of serious fanatics. Crescent City was comprised of
thousands of such groups.
The Westerns library had been damaged in the attack, and was
in danger of losing its backups as well. It urgently sought
replication in any warm body it could find.
Peabody just happened to be there. And was able to provide the
childhood link that let it all in, for some of his strongest memories
were of the American West, where he had grown up.
He was ambushed by pure Cowboy.
He was among the red buttes of Arizona, in the glory of so much
land and so much blue sky.
Then it was more than recalling. It was learning. It was
knowing.
He expanded far beyond himself. He was an entire country, its
mythos, its deep, imperative tales.
Ancient Westerns filmed in Sedona. Radio chants from Wind
Rock, heard at night on the clear-channel station. The great white
mountain outside Flagstaff where the Hopi spiderwoman spun the
world below. Buffalo gals, Texas bluebells, Oklahoma nights, bar
fights, cattle drives, range wars. Stories, stories, stories.
 Trying on a glowing golden mythical man coaxed, no flung, from
the Consilience; trying him on for size, with cultural overlays,
Broadway plays, Gunsmoke, Cormac McCarthy, slaughterhouses,
dangerous cities, rivers filled with trout, poets on the loose. Science