"Ken MacLeod - Engines of Light 2 - Darklight" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

6 dawsonтАЩs night

7 ancient astronauts

8 a man you donтАЩt meet every day

9 vaster than intellects and more cool

10 the gods ourselves

11 catastrophic loss of data

12 lights in the sky

13 st. teilhardтАЩs day




Rawliston Sprawls; from space itтАЩs a grubby smudge, staining the glassy clarity of the atmosphere along

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 Dark Light


fifty kilometers of coastline. Biggest city on the planet, home to a million or so human and other beings.
Seven centuries old and ever renewed; two centuries on from the biggest jolt it ever got; hours away
from another. ItтАЩs coming like an earthquake, coming like a runaway train, coming like a lightspeed ship.


Stone froze in a cold sky. Around him, the gliderтАЩs struts creaked and its cables sang. Hundreds of
meters below his feet, the valley crawled. The Great Vale stretched fifty or so kilometers before him and
the same distance behind him, its fields and towns, rivers and screes filling his sight. Through the
imperfect glass disks of his goggles he couldnтАЩt quite see the mighty rockfalls at either end that had,
thousands of years ago, isolated the valley, but he could just make out the distant gleam of the lake
formed by Big River against the natural dam at the eastern end. The midmorning sun glimmered on a
series of meanders in the riverтАЩs fat, lazy length along the valleyтАЩs broad floor. The word for world is
тАЬvalley,тАЭ he thought, and the word we use for ourselves is the тАЬflying people,тАЭ and the word the savages
use for themselves is тАЬpeopleтАЭ. Oh, but arenтАЩt we a sophisticated and self-conscious Stone Age
civilization!

He hung in a leather harness; the handles he gripped were made from the paired humeri of an eagle; the
fabric of the wing above him was of hand-woven silk doped with alcohol-thinned pine resin; the craftтАЩs
singing structural members were tensed bamboo, its cables vine and its stitching gut. Flint blades and
bone needles and wooden shuttles had been worn smooth in its manufacture; no metal tool had touched
it. No man, either; the whole process, from harvesting the raw materials through building it to this, its
test flight, was womenтАЩs work. It would be bad luck for a man to touch it until it had been brought safely
back from its maiden flight and formally turned over. Stone wryly reflected on the canny custom that
assigned the rougher and riskier parts of glider productionтАФfinding the eagleтАЩs carcass, tapping the
resin, testing the craftтАФto women like him. He enjoyed the excitement and the solitude of these tasks,