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

smoky clouds and faded and winter set in, juddering for hours along the old public lanes of the
motorways as the sleek new transports swept past outside them with their occupants tele-conferencing or
asleep. But Tom liked the sense of effort, the sense of getting there, the rumble of the tires and the
off-center pull of the steering, swapping over with Terr every hour or two, and the way the hills rose and
fell but always got bigger as they headed north. And finally stepping out, and seeing the snow and the
sunlight on the high flanks, and feeling the clean bite of the wind. They climbed fells where the tracks had
long-vanished and the sheep looked surprised at these humans who had invaded their territory. Hot and
panting, they stopped in the lee of cols, and looked down at all the tiny details of the vast world they had
made. By then, Terr had had changed options from SF to the early Romantics, poets such as
Wordsworth and Coleridge, and she would chant from the Prelude in her lovely voice as they clambered
up Scarfell and the snow and the lakes gleamed around them and Tom struggled, breathless, to keep up
until they finally rested, sweating and freezing, and Terr sat down and smiled at him and pulled off her top
layers of fleece and Gore-Tex and began to unlace her boots. It was ridiculous, the feel of her snow and
her body intermingled, and the chant of her breath in his ear, urging him on as the wind and her fingers
and the shadows of the clouds swept over his naked back. Dangerous, too, in the mid of winter-you'd
probably die from exposure here if you lapsed into a post-coital sleep. But it was worth it. Everything.
He'd never felt more alive.

Terr huddled against him in a coll. Her skin was taut, freezing, as the sweat evaporated from between
them. Another hour, and the sun would start to set. Already, it was sinking down through the clouds over
Helvellyn with a beauty that Tom reckoned even old Wordsworth would have been hard put to describe.
His fingers played over the hardness of Terr's right nipple, another lovely peak Wordsworth might have
struggled to get over in words. It was totally, absolutely, cold, but, to his pleasant surprise, Tom found
that he, too, was getting hard. He pressed his mouth against Terr's shoulder, ran his tongue around that
lovely hollow beneath her ear. She was shivering already, but he felt her give a shiver within the shiver,
and traced his fingers down her belly, and thought of the stars which would soon be coming, and perhaps
of finding one of those abandoned farmhouses where they could spend the night, and of Terr's sweet
moisture, and of licking her there. She tensed and shivered again, which he took as encouragement, even
though he was sure, as the coat slid a few inches from his shoulder, that he felt a snowflake settle on his
bare back. Then, almost abruptly, she drew away.

"Look over there, Tom. Can you see them-those specks, those colors?"

Tom looked, and sure enough, across in the last blazing patch of sunlight, a few people were turning like
birds. They could have been using microlites, but on a day like this, the sound of their engines would have
cut through the frozen air. But Tom had a dim recollection of reading of a new craze, still regarded as
incredibly dangerous, both physically and mentally, whereby you took a gene-twist in a vial, and grew
wings, just like in a fairy tale, or an SF story.



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Tom had dreamed, experienced, all the possibilities. He'd loved those creatures in Fantasia, half-human,
half-faun; those beautiful winged horses. And not much later, he'd willed the green-eyed monsters and
robots whom the cartoon superheroes battled with to put their evil plans into practice at least once. Then
there were the old episodes of Star Trek-the older, the better-and all those other series where the crews
of warp-driven starships calmly conversed around long florescent-lit tables with computer-generated