"Sean McMullen - Souls in the Great Machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (McMullen Sean)

"The Calculor is made of people, Fras Lewrick. People get tired, but
the Calculor merely slows down."

"I'm down inside it all the time. It has moods, it feels--"

"I designed the Calculor, Lewrick! I know its workings better than
anyone." "As you will, Highliber."

Zarvora rubbed at her temples. She too had a headache now, but thanks
to the long vibrating wire beneath the brass plate her discomfort
remained unseen.
"You are trying to tell me something, Fras Lewrick. What is it--and
please be honest."
"The Calculor is like a river galley or an army, Frelle Highliber.
There is a certain.." spirit or soul about it. I mean, ah, that just
as a river galley is more than a pile of planks, oars, and sailors, so
too is the Calculor more than just a mighty engine for arithmetic. When
it is fired, perhaps it sometimes lets a bad calculation through rather
than bothering to repeat it."

"It is not alive," she replied emphatically. "It is just a simple,
powerful machine. The problem is human in origin."

"Very good, Highliber," Lewrick said stiffly. "Shall I have the
correlator components flogged?"

"No! Do nothing out of the ordinary. Just check each of the function
registers on both sides of the machine as you run the diagnostic
calculations. We must make it repeat its error, then isolate the
section at fault. Oh, and send a jar of tourney beer to each cell when
the components are dismissed. The Calculor played well before that
error."

"That would encourage the culprit, Highliber."

"Perhaps, but it is also important to reward hard work. The problem is
a hole in my design, Fras Lewrick, not the component who causes
problems through it. We could take all the components out into the
courtyard and shoot them, but the hole would remain for some newly
trained component to crawl through."

Libris was Rochester's mayoral library. Its stone beam flash
communications tower was over 600 feet high and dominated the skyline
of the city. Unofficially, the Highliber of Libris was second only to
the Mayor in power, and she controlled a network of libraries and
librarians scattered over dozens of may orates and thousands of miles.
In many ways the Highliber was even more powerful than the Mayor. There
was no dominant religion across the may orates of the Southeast, so the
library system performed many functions of a powerful clergy. The