"Ian R. Macleod - New Light On The Drake Equation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

be. Give them their chance, is what I say. After all, we had ours. And they're so much better at it than we
are."

Terr put down her glass on the rough table, leaned back and stretched on the rickety chair. Her hair
sheened back from her shoulders, and looked almost blonde for a moment. Darkness hollowed in her
throat. "When you get to my age, Tom-our age. It just seems тАж Looking back is more important than
looking forward тАж"

"Is that why you're here?"

A more minor stretch and shrug. Her flesh whispered and seemed to congeal around her throat in stringy
clumps. Her eyes hollowed, and the candlelight went out in them. Her arms thinned. Tom found himself
wishing there were either more illumination, or less. He wanted to see Terr as she was, or cloaked in total
darkness; not like this, twisting and changing like the ibex at the twilight waterhole. So perhaps candlelight
was another thing that the young should reserve for themselves, like the vials, like flying, like love and
faith and enthusiasm. Forget about romance-what you needed at his, at their, ages, was to know. You
wanted certainty. And Tom himself looked, he knew, from his occasional forays in front of a mirror, like
a particularly vicious cartoon caricature of the Tom Kelly that Terr remembered; the sort of thing that
Gerald Scarfe had done to Reagan and Thatcher in the last century. The ruined veins in his cheeks and
eyes. The bruises and swellings. Those damn age spots which had recently started appearing-gravestone
marks, his grandmother had once called them. He was like Tom Kelly hungover after a fight in a bar, with
a bout of influenza on top of that, and then a bad case of sunburn, and struggling against the influence of
the gravity of a much larger planet. That was pretty much what aging felt like, too, come to think of it.

Flu, and too much gravity.



┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖



He'd never been one for chat-up lines. He'd had the kind of natural not-quite regular looks when he was
young which really didn't need enhancing-which was good, because he'd never have bothered, or been
able to afford it-but he had a shyness which came out mostly like vague disinterest when he talked to
girls. The lovelier they were, the more vague and disinterested Tom became. But this woman or girl he
happened to find himself walking beside along the canals of this old and once-industrial city called
Birmingham after one of those parties when the new exchange students were supposed to meet up, she
was different. She was English for a start, which to Tom, a little-traveled American on this foreign shore,
seemed both familiar and alien. Everything she said, every gesture, had a slightly different slant to it, which
he found strange, intriguing тАж

She'd taken him around the canals to Gas Street Basin, the slick waters sheened with antique petrol,
antique fog, and along the towpath to the Sealife Centre, where deep-sea creatures out of Lovecraft
mouthed close to the tripleglass of their pressurized tanks. Then across the iron bridges of the Worcester
and Birmingham Canal to a pub. Over her glass of wine, Terr had explained that an American president
had once sat here in this pub and surprised the locals and drunk a pint of bitter during some world
conference. Her hair was fine blonde. Her eyes were stormy green. She'd shrugged off the woolen coat
with a collar that had brushed the exquisite line of her neck and jaw as she walked in a way that had
made Tom envy it. Underneath, she was wearing a sleeveless dark blue dress which was tight around her