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

sports companies and their wings, a flesh of fine silk stretched between feathery bones, then folded up
behind their backs like delicate umbrellas. And they were speaking French, too; speaking it in loud high
voices, but overdoing every phrase and gesture and emphasis in the way that people always did when
they were new to a language. They thought that just because they could understand each other and talk
sensibly to their flying instructor and follow the tour guide and order a drink at the bar that they were
jabbering away like natives, but then they hadn't yet come up against Madame Brissac, who would be
bound to devise some bureaucratic twist or incomprehension which would send them away from here
without whatever particular form or permission it was that they were expecting. Tom turned back to
Madame Brissac and gave her a grin from around the edges of his gathering absinthe headache. She
didn't bother to return it. Instead, she muttered something that sounded like I'm Judy.

"What? Voulez-vous r├йpeter?"

"Is Thursday."

"Ah. Je comprends. I see тАж" Not that he did quite, but the flyers were getting impatient and crowding
closer to him, wings rustling with echoes of the morning air that had recently been filling them and the
smell of fresh sweat, clean endeavour. How was it, Tom wondered, that they could look so beautiful
from a distance, and so stupid and ugly close up? But Thursday-and he'd imagined it was Wednesday.
Of course he'd thought that it was Wednesday, otherwise he wouldn't be here in St. Hilaire, would he?
He was a creature of habit, worn in by the years like the grain of the old wood of Madame Brissac's
counter. So he must have lost track, and/or not bothered to check his calendar back up on the mountain.
An easy enough mistake to make, living the way he did. Although тАж

"You require them? Yes?"

"S'il vous pla├оt тАж"

At long last, Madame Brissac was turning to the pigeonholes where she kept his and a few other
message cards filed according to her own alchemic system. Putting them in one place, labelled under
Kelly; Tom-or American; Drunk; Elderly; Stupid-was too simple for her. Neither had Tom ever been
able to see a particular pattern which would relate to the source of the cards, which were generally from
one or other of his various academic sponsors and came in drips and drabs and rushes, but mostly drabs.
Those old brown lines of wooden boxes, which looked as if they had probably once held proper
old-fashioned letters and telegrams, and perhaps messages and condolences from the World Wars, and
the revolutionary proclamations of the sans-culottes, and decrees from the Sun King, and quite possibly
even the odd pigeon, disgorged their contents to Madame Brissac's quick hands in no way that Tom
could ever figure. He could always ask, of course, but that would just be an excuse for a raising of Gallic
eyebrows and shoulders in mimed incomprehension. After all, Madame Brissac was Madame Brissac,
and the flyers behind him were whispering, fluttering, trembling like young egrets, and it was none of his
business.

There were market stalls lined across the Place de la R├йvolution, which had puzzled Tom on his way into
the bureau de poste, but no longer. The world was right and he was wrong. This was Thursday. And his
habitual caf├й was busier than usual, although the couple who were occupying his table got up at his
approach and strolled off, hand in hand, past the heaped and shadowed displays of breads and fruits and
cheeses. The girl had gone for an Audrey Hepburn look, but the lad had the muscles of a paratrooper
beneath his sleeveless tee shirt, and his flesh was green and lightly scaled. To Tom, it looked like a skin
disease. He wondered, as lonely men gazing at young couples from caf├й tables have wondered since time
immemorial, what the hell she saw in him.