"Ken MacLeod - A Case of Consilience" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

Whatever's going."

As Qasim made his way through the crowd to the bar, Donald reflected that his friend was likely no
more off-duty than he was. A chaplain and an intelligence officer could both relax in identical olive T-
shirts and chinos, but vigilance and habit were less readily shrugged off than dress-codes. The Kurdish
colonel still now and again called his service the mukhabarat. It was one of his running gags, along with
the one about electronics and electrodes. And the one about extra-terrestrial intelligence. And the one
aboutтАж yes, for running gags Qasim was your man.

As I am for gloomy reflections, Donald thought. Sadness, tristia, had been one of the original seven
deadly sins. Which probably meant every Scottish Presbyterian went straight to hell, or at least to a very
damp purgatory, if the Catholics were right. If the Catholics were right! After three hundred and
seventeen days in the Extra-Terrestrial Contact Station, this was among the least heretical of the
thoughts Donald Maclntyre was willing to countenance.

Qasim came back with the passing cure, and lasting bane, of the Scottish sin; and with what might have
been a more dependably cheering mood-lifter: a gripe about his own problems. Problems which, as
Donald listened to them, seemed more and more to resemble his own.

"How am I supposed to tell if an underground fungoid a hundred meters across that communicates by
chemical gradients is feeding us false information? Or if an operating system written by an ET AI is a
trojan? Brussels still expects files on all of them, when we don't even know how many civs we're dealing
with. Bloody hell, Donald, pardon my English, there's one of the buggers we only suspect is out there
because everyone comes back from its alleged home planet with weird dreams." Qasim cocked a black
eyebrow. "Maybe I shouldn't be telling you that one."

"I've heard about the dreams," said Donald. "In a different context." He sighed. "It's a bit hard to explain
to some people that I don't take confession."

"Confessions are not to be relied upon," Qasim said, looking somewhere else. "AnywayтАж what I would
have to confess, myself, is that the Etcetera Station is a bit out of its depth. We are applying concepts
outside their context."

"Now that," said Donald with some bitterness, "is a suspicion I do my best to resist."

It was one the Church had always resisted, a temptation dangled in different forms down the ages. As


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/MacLeod,%20Ken%20-%20A%20Case%20of%20Consilience%20[html].html (3 of 11)4-7-2007 2:23:56
 MacLeod, Ken - A Case of Consilience

soon as the faith had settled on its view of one challenge, another had come along. In the Carpenter's
workshop there were many clue-sticks, and the whacks had seldom ceased for long. In the beginning,
right there in the Letters, you could see the struggle against heresies spawned by Greek metaphysics and
Roman mysticism. Barely had the books snapped shut on Arius when Rome had crashed. Then the
Muslim invasions. The split between the Eastern and Western churches, Christendom cloven on a
lemma. Then the discovery of the New World, and a new understanding of the scope and grip of the
great, ancient religions of the Old. The Reformation. The racialist heresy. The age of the Earth. Biblical
criticism. Darwin. The twentieth century had brought the expanding universe, the gene, the unconscious
тАФhow quaint the controversies over these now seemed! Genetic engineering, human-animal chimerae,