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

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тАЬThe evolution of the brainтАж allowed us to construct a symbolic universe that seems
more real and more vast than the universe itself.тАЭ
тАФNadeau & Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe



February 2115
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A wave of information-packed light swept through space and
washed across the moon and Earth.
More waves followed, moving behind one another at precise
intervals which would translate, on Earth, into months.


July 8, 2115
 Radio Cowboy and the New Frontier

The pirate attack on Crescent City was swift and brutal, and came
while Peabody was visiting the elephant.
Peabody lived for night, and slept through most of each hot,
blue-struck tropical day. The small tower in which he lived alone,
high above the floating city, bristled with antennae and was
crammed with the accouterments of radio reception and
transmission: tuners, amplifiers, devices that he had designed and
built or grown, and much older electronics garnered from the
mainland, all patrolled by rust-eating bacteria else they would have
had a life of months instead of years in the corrosive sea air.
Peabody had been in Crescent City so long that most people
referred to him as, simply, the EngineerтАФa reclusive though not
unfriendly man who knew everything about the operation of the
city.
This suited Peabody.
After he woke, at sunset, he picked with chopsticks at his usual
bowl of brown rice and sipped jasmine tea, gradually becoming
alert. Several thunderstorms shaded the jade sea in patches. One
veered close and darkened the sky.
Cold wind washed the tower. Lightning shot to the sea; thunder
cracked. Rain dropped in silver columns, brushing the edge of the
city. The spidersteel windows, which he usually kept in mesh form,
thickened automatically at the first drops of rain to keep his
electronics dry.
A line of whitecaps five hundred feet below looked, from this
height, like a standing wave, breaking on grass-stabilized beaches.
Coconut palms bent beneath gusts of wind. Aquamarine farming
lagoons, filled with fish and mollusks and surrounded by nodes of