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

hips and smallish breasts, and showed her fine legs. Of course, he envied that dress as well. There was a
smudged red crescent at the rim of the glass made by her lipstick. Terr was studying literature then, an
arcane enough subject in itself, and for good measure she'd chosen as her special field the kind of stories
of the imaginary future which had been popular for decades until the real and often quite hard to believe
present had finally extinguished them. Tom, who'd been immersed in such stuff for much of his teenage
years, almost forgot his reticence as he recommended John Varley, of whom she hadn't even heard, and
that she avoid the late-period Heinlein, and then to list his own particular favorites, which had mostly
been Golden Age writers (yes, yes, she knew the phrase) like Simak and Van Vogt and Wyndham and
Sheckley. And then there was Lafferty, and Cordwainer Smith тАж

Eventually, sitting at a table in the top room of that bar where an American president might once have sat
which overlooked the canal where the long boats puttered past with their antique petrol motors, bleeding
their colors into the mist, Terr had steered Tom away from science fiction, and nudged him into talking
about himself. He found out later that the whole genre of SF was already starting to bore her in any case.
And he discovered that Terr had already worked her way through half a dozen courses, and had grown
bored with all of them. She was bright enough to get a feel for any subject very quickly, and in the
process to convince some new senior lecturer that, contrary to all the evidence on file, she finally had
found her true focus in medieval history or classics or economics. And she was quick-incredibly so, by
Tom's standards-at languages. That would have given her a decent career in any other age; even as she
sat there in her blue dress in that Birmingham pub, he could picture her beside that faceless American
president, whispering words in his ears. But by then it was already possible for any normally intelligent
human to acquire any new language in a matter of days. Deep therapy. Bio-feedback.
Nano-enhancement. Out in the real world, those technologies that Tom had spent his teenage years
simply dreaming about as he wondered over those dusty analog pages had been growing at an
exponential rate.

But Terr, she fluttered from enthusiasm to enthusiasm, flower to flower, sipping its nectar, then once again
spreading her wings and wafting off to some other faculty. And people, too. Terr brought that same
incredible focus to bear on everyone she met as well-or at least those who interested her-understanding,
absorbing, taking everything in.

She was even doing it now, Tom decided as they sat together all these years later outside his hut on this
starlit French mountain. This Terr who changed and unchanged in the soft flood of candlelight across this
battered table was reading him like a book. Every word, every gesture: the way this bottle of wine, good
though it was, wouldn't be anything like enough to see him through the rest of this night. She was feeling
the tides of the world which had borne him here with all his hopes still somehow intact like Noah in his
Ark, and then withdrawn and left him waiting, beached, dry and drowning.

"What are you thinking?"

He shrugged. But for once, the truth seemed easy. "That pub you took me to, the first time we met."

"You mean the Malt House?"

Terr was bright, quick. Even now. Of course she remembered.

"And you went on and on about SF," she added.

"Did I? I suppose I did тАж"