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

Tom listened to the sound of the waterhole. What were the chances, with him sitting here, of anything
happening right now? Bleep, bleep. Bip, bip. Greetings from the planet Zarg. Quite, quite impossible. But
then, given all the possibilities in the universe, what were the chances of him, Tom Kelly, sitting here on
this particular mountain at this particular moment with this particular bank of equipment and this particular
near-empty bottle of vin de table listening to this frequency in the first place? That was pretty wild in
itself. Wild enough, in fact-he still couldn't help it-to give him goosebumps. Life itself was such an
incredible miracle. In fact, probably unique, if one was to believe the odds of which was assigned to it by
the few eccentric souls who still bothered to tinker with the Drake Equation. That was the problem.
He forced himself to stand up, stretch, leave the room, the speakers still hissing with a soft sea-roar, the
monitor flickering and jumping. The moment when the transmission finally came through was bound to
when you turned your back. It stood to reason. A watched kettle, after all тАж And not that he was
superstitious. So he wandered out into the night again, which was now starry and marvelous and
moonless and complete, and he tossed the evening's first empty into the big dumpster and looked up at
the heavens, and felt that swell in his chest and belly he'd felt those more than sixty years ago which was
still like the ache of cola and ice cream. And had he eaten? He really couldn't remember, although he was
pretty sure he'd fixed some coffee. This darkness was food enough for him, all the pouring might of the
stars. Odd to say, but on nights like this, the darkness had a glow to it like something finely wrought,
finally polished, a luster and a sheen. You could believe in God. You could believe in anything. And the
tripwires were still just visible, the vanishing trails like tiny shooting stars criss-crossing this arid limestone
plain as they absorbed the endless transmission. They flowed towards the bowl of darkness which was
the hidden valley, the quiet waterhole, the flyers sleeping in their beds in St. Hilaire, dreaming of thermals,
twitching their wings. Tom wondered if Madame Brissac slept. It was hard to imagine her anywhere
other than standing before her pigeonholes in the office de poste, waiting for the next poor sod she could
make life difficult for. The pigeonholes themselves, whatever code it was that she arranged them in, really
would be worth making the effort to find out about on the remote chance that, Madame Brissac being
Madame Brissac, the information was sorted in a way that Tom's computers, endlessly searching the roar
of chaos for order, might have overlooked. And he also wondered if it wasn't time already for another
bottle, one of the plastic liter ones, which tasted like shit if you started on them, but were fine if you had
something half-decent first to take off the edge тАж

A something-a figure-was walking up the track towards him. No, not a fluke, and not random data, and
certainly not an ibex. Not Madame Brissac either, come to explain her pigeonholes and apologize for her
years of rudeness. Part of Tom was watching the rest of Tom in quiet amazement as his addled mind and
tired eyes slowly processed the fact that he wasn't alone, and that the figure was probably female, and
could almost have been, no looked like, in fact was, the woman in the dark blue dress he'd glimpsed
down by the lace stalls in the market that morning. And she really did bear a remarkable resemblance to
Terr, at least in the sole dim light which emanated from the monitors inside his hut. The way she walked.
The way she was padding across the bare patch of ground in front of the tripwires. That same lightness.
And then her face. And her voice.

"Why do you have to live so bloody far up here Tom? The woman I asked in the post office said it was
just up the road тАж"

He shrugged. He was floating. His arms felt light, his hands empty. "That would be Madame Brissac."

"Would it? Anyway, she was talking rubbish."

"You should have tried asking in French."