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

"I was speaking French. My poor feet. It's taken me bloody hours."

Tom had to smile. The stars were behind Terr, and they were shining on her once-blonde hair, which the
years had silvered to the gleam of those tripwires, and touched the lines around her mouth as she smiled.
He felt like crying and laughing. Terr. "Well, that's Madame Brissac for you."

"So? Are you going to invite me inside?"

"There isn't much of an inside."

Terr took another step forward on her bare feet. She was real. So close to him. He could smell the dust
on her salt flesh. Feel and hear her breathing. She was Terr alright. He wasn't drunk or dreaming, or at
least not that drunk yet; he'd only had-what?-two bottles of wine so far all evening. And she had and
hadn't changed.

"Well," she said, "that's Tom Kelly for you, too, isn't it?"



┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖



The idea of sitting in the hut was ridiculous on a night like this. And the place, as Tom stumbled around in
it and slewed bottles off the table and shook rubbish off the chairs, was a dreadful, terrible mess. So he
hauled two chairs out into the night for them to sit on, and the table to go between, and found unchipped
glasses from somewhere, and gave them a wipe to get rid of the mold, and ferreted around in the depths
of his boxes until he found the solitary bottle of Santernay le Chenay 2058 he'd been saving for First
Contact-or at least until he felt too depressed-and lit one of the candles he kept for when the generator
went down. Then he went searching for a corkscrew, ransacking cupboards and drawers and cursing
under his breath at the ridiculousness of someone who got through as much wine as he did not being able
to lay his hands upon one-but then the cheaper bottles were all screw-capped, and the really cheap
plastic things had tops a blind child could pop off one-handed. He was breathless when he finally sat
down. His heart ached. His face throbbed. His ears were singing.

"How did you find me, Terr?"

"I told you, I asked that woman in the post office. Madame Brissac."

"I mean тАж" He used both hands to still the shaking as he sloshed wine from the bottle. "тАж here in
France, in St. Hilaire, on this mountain."

She chuckled. She sounded like the Terr of old speaking to him down the distance of an antique
telephone line. "I did a search for you. One of those virtual things, where you send an ai out like a genie
from a bottle. But would you believe I had to explain to it that SETI meant the Search for
Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence? It didn't have the phrase in its standard vocabulary. But it found you
anyway, once I'd sorted that out. You have this old-fashioned website-thingy giving information on your
project here and inviting new sponsors. You say it will be a day-by-day record of setbacks, surprises
and achievements. You even offer tee-shirts. By the look of it, it was last updated about twenty years
ago. You can virtually see the dust on it through the screen тАж"