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

websites when he wasn't that much older? Was it pouring through the library screens at college, or was it
now as he stood looking up at the gathering stars from his lonely hut on this lonely French mountain? Or
was it somewhere else? Somewhere out there, sweet and glorious and imponderable?

Most of the people he still knew, or at least maintained a sort of long-distance touch with, had given up
with whatever had once bugged them some time ago; the ones, in fact, who seemed the happiest, the
most settled, the most at ease with their lives-and thus generally had least to do with him-had never really
started worrying about such things in the first place. They took vacations in places like St. Hilaire, they
grew wings or gills just like the kids did and acquired fresh languages and outlooks as they swallowed
their vials and flew or dived in their new element. He put down his cup of coffee, which was already
skinned and cold, and then he smiled to himself-he still couldn't help it-as he watched more of the night
come in. Maybe it was that scene in Fantasia, watching it on video when he was little more than a baby.
The one set to the music he recognized later as Beethoven's Pastoral. Those cavorting cherubs and
centaurs, and then at the end, after Zeus has packed away his thunderbolts, the sun sets, and Morpheus
comes over in a glorious cloak of night. The idea of life amid the stars had already been with him then,
filling him as he squatted entranced before the screen and the Baltimore traffic buzzed by outside
unnoticed, filled with something that was like a sweet sickness, like his mother's embrace when she
thought he was sleeping, like the ache of cola and ice cream. That sweet ache had been with him, he
decided as he looked up and smiled as the stars twinkled on and goosebumps rose on his flesh, ever
since.

So Tom had become a nocturnal beast, a creature of twilights and dawns. He supposed that he'd
become so used to his solitary life up here on this wide and empty mountain that he'd grown a little
agora-or was it claustro?-phobic. Hence the need for the absinthe this morning-or at least the extra slug
of it. The Wednesdays, the bustle of the town, had become quite incredible to him, a blast of light and
smell and sound and contact, almost like those VR suites where you tumbled through huge fortresses on
strange planets and fought and cannon-blasted those ever-imaginary aliens. Not that Tom had ever
managed to bring himself to do such a thing. As the monsters glowered over him, jaws agape and fangs
dripping, all he'd wanted to do was make friends and ask them about their customs and religions and
mating habits. He'd never got through many levels of those VR games, the few times he'd tried them.
Now he thought about it, he really hadn't got through so very many levels of the huge VR game known as
life, either.

Almost dark. A time for secrets and lovers and messages. A time for the clink of wine-glasses and the
soft puck of opening bottles. The west was a faint red blush of clouds and mountains, which glimmered in
a pool on the fading slope of the mountain. Faint grey shapes were moving down there; from the little
Tom could see now from up here, they could have been stray flares and impulses from the failing
remaining rods and cones in his weary eyes-random scraps of data-but he knew from other nights and
mornings that they were the shy ibex which grazed this plateau, and were drawn here from miles around
along with many other creatures simply because most of the moisture that fell here in the winter rains and
summer storms drained straight through the cave-riddled limestone. Sometimes, looking that way on
especially clear nights, Tom would catch the glimmer of stars as if a few had fallen there, although on the
rare occasions he'd trekked to the pool down across difficult slopes, he'd found that, close up, it was a
disappointment. A foul brown oval of thick amoebic fluid surrounded by cracked and caked mud, it was
far away from the sweet oasis he'd imagined where bright birds and predators and ruminants all bowed
their heads to sip the silver cool liquid and forget, in the brief moments of their parched and mutual need,
their normal animosities. But it was undeniably a waterhole, and as such important to the local fauna. It
had even been there on the map all those years ago, when he'd been looking for somewhere to begin
what he was sure was to be the remainder of his life's work. A blue full stop, a small ripple of hope and
life. He'd taken it as a sign.