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

Tom stood up and dropped a few francs on the table and blundered off between the market stalls. That
dark blue sleeveless dress, those legs, that hair. His heart was pounding as it hadn't done in years from
some strange inner exertion of memory. Even if it wasn't her, which it obviously wasn't, he still wanted to
know, to see. But St. Hilaire was Thursday-busy. The teeming market swallowed him up and spat him
out again downhill where the steps ran beside the old battlements and the river flashed under the willow
trees, then uphill by the bright, expensive shops along the Rue de Commerce, which offered in their
windows designer clothes, designer vials, designer lives. Fifteen different brands of colloquial French in
bottles like costly perfumes and prices to match. Only you crushed them between your teeth and the
glass tasted like spun sugar and tiny miracles of lavish engineering poured down your throat and through
the walls of your belly and into your bloodstream where they shed their protective coating and made
friends with your immune system and hitched a ride up to your brain. Lessons were still necessary (they
played that down on the packaging) but only one or two, and they involved little more than sitting in
flashing darkness in a Zen-like state of calm induced by various drug suppositories (this being France)
while nanomolecules fiddled with your sites of language and cognition until you started parlez vous-ing
like a native. Or you could grow wings, although the vials in the sports shops were even more expensive.
But the dummies beyond the plateglass whispered and beckoned to Tom and fluttered about excitedly;
Day-Glo fairies, urging him to make the investment in a fortnight's experience that would last a lifetime.

Tom came to an old square at the far end of the shops. The Mus├йe de Masque was just opening, and a
group of people who looked like late revelers from the night before were sitting on its steps and sharing a
bottle of neat Pernod. The women had decorated their wings with silks and jewels; although by now they
looked like tired hatstands. The men, but for the pulsing tattoo-like adornments they'd woven into their
flesh and the pouch-like g-strings around their crotches which spoke, so to speak, volumes, were
virtually naked. Their skin was heliotrope. Tom guessed it was the color for this season. To him, though,
they looked like a clutch of malnourished, crash-landed gargoyles. He turned back along the street, and
found his Citro├лn pretty much where he thought he'd left it by the alimentation g├йn├йrale where he'd
already purchased next month's supplies, and turned the old analog key he'd left in the ignition, and
puttered slowly out across the cobbles, supplies swishing and jingling in their boxes, then gave the throttle
an angry shove, and roared out towards midday, the heat, the scattered olive trees and the grey-white
bulk of his mountain.



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Dusk. The coming stars. His time. His mountain. Tom stood outside his sparse wooden hut, sipping
coffee and willing the sun to unravel the last of her glowing clouds from the horizon. Around him on the
large, flat, mile-wide slightly west-tilted slab of pavement limestone glittered the silver spiderweb of his
tripwires, which were sheening with dew as the warmth of the day evaporated, catching the dying light as
they and he waited for the stars.

He amazed himself sometimes, the fact that he was up here doing this, the fact that he was still searching
for anything at all at the ripe nearly-old age of near-seventy, let alone for something as wild and
extravagant as intelligent extra-terrestrial life. Where had it began? What had started him on this quest of
his? Had it really been those SF stories-dropping through the Stargate with Dave Bowman, or staggering
across the sandworm deserts of Arrakis with Paul Atreides? Was it under rocks in Eastport when he was
a kid raising the tiny translucent crabs to the light, or was it down the wires on the few remaining SETI