"Deepsix" - читать интересную книгу автора (Макдевитт Джек)

PART 1 BURBAGE POINT

I

November 2223

The impending collision out there somewhere in the great dark between a gas giant and a world very much like our own has some parallels to the eternal collision between religion and common sense. One is bloated and full of gas, and the other is measurable and solid. One engulfs everything around it, and the other simply provides a place to stand. One is a rogue destroyer that has come in out of the night, and the other is a warm well-lighted place vulnerable to the sainted mobs. -Gregory MacAllister, Have Your Money Ready

They came back to Maleiva HI to watch the end of the world.

Researchers had been looking forward to it since its imminence was proclaimed almost twenty years earlier by Jeremy Benchwater Morgan, an ill-tempered combustible astrophysicist who, according to colleagues, had been born old. Even today Morgan is the subject of all kinds of dark rumors, that he had driven one child to tranks and another to suicide, that he'd forced his first wife into an early grave, that he'd relentlessly destroyed careers of persons less talented than he even though he gained nothing by doing so, that he'd consistently taken credit for the work of others. How much of this is true, no one really knows. What is on the record, however, is that Morgan had been both hated and feared by his colleagues and apparently by a deranged brother-in-law who made at least two attempts to kill him. When he'd died, finally, of heart failure, his onetime friend and longtime antagonist Gunther Beekman, commented privately that he had beaten his second wife to the punch. In accordance with his instructions, no memorial was conducted. It was, some said, his last act of vindictiveness, denying his family and associates the satisfaction of staying home.

Because he had done the orbital work and predicted the coming collision, the Academy had given his name to the rogue world that had invaded the Maleiva system. Although that was a gesture required by tradition in any case, many felt that the Academy directors had taken grim pleasure in their action.

Morgan's World approached Jovian dimensions. Its mass was 296 times that of Earth. Diameter at the equator was 131,600 kilometers, at the poles about five percent less. This oblateness resulted from a rotational period of just over nine hours. It had a rocky core a dozen times as massive as the Earth. It was otherwise composed primarily of hydrogen and helium.

It was tilted almost ninety degrees to its own plane of movement, and half as much to the system plane. It was a gray-blue world, its atmosphere apparently placid and untroubled, with neither rings nor satellites.

"Do we know where it came from?" Marcel asked.

Gunther Beekman, small, bearded, overweight, was seated beside him on the bridge. He nodded and brought up a fuzzy patch on the auxiliary display, closed in on it, and enhanced. "Here's the suspect," he said. "It's a section of the Chippewa Cloud, and if we're right, Morgan's been traveling half a billion years."

In approximately three weeks, on Saturday, December 9, at 1756 hours GMT, the intruder would collide head-on with Maleiva III.

Maleiva was the infant daughter of the senator who'd chaired the science funding committee when the initial survey was done, two decades earlier. There were eleven planets in the system, but only the doomed third world had received a name to go with its Roman numeral: From the beginning they called it Deepsix. In the often malicious nature of things, it was also one of the very few worlds known to harbor life. Even though locked in a three-thousand-year-old ice age, it would have made, in time, an exquisite new outpost for the human race.

"The collision here is only the beginning of the process," Beekman said. "We can't predict precisely what's going to happen afterward, but within a few thousand years Morgan will have made a complete shambles of this system." He leaned back, folded his hands behind his head, and adopted an expression of complacency. "It's going to be an interesting show to watch."

Beekman was the head of the Morgan Project, a planetologist who had twice won the Nobel, a lifelong bachelor, and a onetime New York State chess champion. He routinely referred to the coming Event as "the collision," but Marcel was struck by the relative sizes of the two worlds. It would most certainly not be a collision. Deepsix would fall into Morgan's clouds, like a coin casually dropped into a pool.

"Why doesn't it have any moons?" he asked Beekman.

Beekman considered the question. "Probably all part of the same catastrophe. Whatever ejected it from its home system would have taken off all the enhancements. We may see something like that here in a few centuries."

"In what way?"

"Morgan's going to stay in the neighborhood. At least for a while. It's going into a highly unstable orbit." He brought up a graphic of Maleiva and its planetary system. One gas giant was so close to the sun that it was actually skimming through the corona. The rest of the system resembled Earth's own, terrestrial worlds in close, gas giants farther out. There was even an asteroid belt, where a world had failed to form because of the nearby presence of a jov-ian. "It'll eventually mangle everything," he said, sounding almost wistful. "Some of these worlds will get dragged out of their orbits into new ones, which will be irregular and probably unstable. One or two may spiral into the sun. Others will get ejected from the system altogether."

"Not a place," said Marcel, "where you'd want to invest in real estate."

"I wouldn't think," agreed Beekman.

Marcel Clairveau was captain of the Wendy Jay, which was carrying the Morgan research team that would observe the collision, record its effects, and return to write papers on energy expansion, gravity waves, and God knew what else. There were forty-five of them, physicists, cosmologists, planetologists, climatologists, and a dozen other kinds of specialists. They were a picked group, the leading people in their respective fields.

"How long's it going to take? Before things settle down again?"

"Oh, hell. I don't know, Marcel. There are too many variables. It may never really stabilize. In the sense you're thinking."

A river of stars crossed the sky, expanding into the North American Nebula. Vast dust clouds were illuminated by far-off Deneb, a white supergiant sixty thousand times as luminous as Sol. More stars were forming in the dust clouds, but they would not ignite for another million years or so.

Marcel looked down on Deepsix.

It could have been an Earth.

They were on the daylight side, over the southern hemisphere. Snowfields covered the continents from the poles to within two or three hundred kilometers of the equator. The oceans were full of drifting ice.

Frigid conditions had prevailed for three thousand years, since Maleiva and its family of planets plowed into the Quiveras, one of the local dust clouds. They had not yet come out the other side, wouldn't for another eight centuries. The dust filtered the sunlight, and the worlds had cooled. Had there been a civilization on Deepsix, it would not have lived.

The climatologists believed that below fifteen degrees south latitude, and above fifteen degrees north, the snow never melted. Had not melted in these thirty centuries. That wasn't necessarily a long time, as such things went. Earth itself had gone through ice ages of similar duration.

Large land animals had survived. They sighted herds moving through the plains and forests of the equatorial area, which at present formed a green strip across two of the continents. There was also occasional movement out on the glaciers. But along the equatorial strip, a multitude of creatures had hung on.

Beekman got up, took a deep breath, rinsed his coffee cup, clapped Marcel on the shoulder, and beamed. "Have to get ready," he said, starting for the door. "I believe the witching hour has arrived."

When he was gone, Marcel allowed himself a long smile. The host of scientific leaders riding on Wendy had given way to unalloyed enthusiasm. On the way out they'd run and rerun simulations of the Event, discussed its potential for establishing this or that view of energy exchange or chronal consequences or gravity wave punctuation. They argued over what they might finally learn about the structure and composition of gas giants, and about the nature of collisions. They expected to get a better handle on long-standing puzzles, like the tilt of Uranus or the unexplained large iron content of worlds like Erasmus in the Vega system and Mercury at home. And the most important implication: It would be their only opportunity to see directly inside a terrestrial planet. They had special sensors for that, because the eruption of energy, during the final spasm, would be blinding.

"It's going to begin to break up here," they'd said, one or another, over and over, pointing at the time line, "and the core will be exposed here. My God, can you imagine what that'll look like?"

The common wisdom was that one could not be a good researcher if one had completely outgrown childhood. If that was so, Marcel knew he had good people along. They were kids who'd come to watch a show. And however they tried to disguise the reality of that, pretending that this was first and foremost a fact-gathering mission, nobody was fooling anybody. They were off on a lark, cashing in the real reward that came from lives of accomplishment. They'd broken into the structure of space, mapped the outer limits of the universe, solved most of the enigmas associated with time, and now they were going to sit back and enjoy the biggest wreck of which anyone had ever heard.

And Marcel was pleased to be along. It was the assignment of a lifetime.

NCA Wendy Jay was the oldest operating vessel in the Academy fleet. Its keel had been laid almost a half century before, and its interior decor consequently possessed a quaintness that gave one a sense of stepping into another age.

Its passengers were watching Morgan through a battery of telescopes and sensors, some mounted on the ship's hull, others on satellite. In every available space throughout the vessel, researchers were peering down into misty blue-gray depths that fell away forever. Gigantic lightning bolts flickered across the face of the world. Occasional meteors raced down the sky, trailing light, vanishing into the clouds.

They gauged its magnetic field, which was two-thirds as strong as Jupiter's, and they recorded the squeals and shrieks of its radio output.

The mood remained festive, and the physicists and planetolo-gists wandered the passageways, visiting one another's quarters, hanging out in the operations center, visiting the bridge, pouring drinks in the workout room. When Marcel strolled down to Wendy's project control, he encountered half a dozen of them gathered around a screen, and when they saw him they raised their glasses to him.

It was a pleasant feeling, to be toasted by the creme de la creme. Not bad for a kid who'd resisted schools and books for years. One teacher had taken him aside when he was fourteen and suggested he might as well apply for the dole then. Get in line early, she'd advised.

When they'd finished the Morgan observations, they moved over to Maleiva III and began the process of inserting probes and positioning satellites. The intention, as Chiang Harmon explained it, was to "take the temperature of the victim, and to listen to its heartbeat, throughout its final days." The team wanted to get every possible physical detail on file. They would establish Maleiva Hi's density and record the fluctuations of its albedo. They would watch the shifting tides. They would examine the depth and composition of its core, analyze the atmospheric mix, and record the air pressure. They would chart its hurricanes and its tornadoes, and they would measure the increasing intensity of the quakes that would eventually shatter the planet.

At breakfast during their first full day in orbit around Deepsix, Beekman announced to everyone in the dining room, and by the PA to the rest, that the correlation of hydrogen to helium, 80.6 to 14.1, matched perfectly with that of Morgan's suspected home star. So now they knew with near certainty where it had been born.

Everyone applauded, and somebody suggested in a deliberately slurred voice that the occasion called for another toast. The noise turned to laughter and Beekman passed around the apple juice. They were in fact a sober lot.

Marcel Clairveau wanted to get a job in management but expected to spend the rest of his life piloting superluminals for the Academy. Prior to that, he'd worked for Kosmik, Inc., shuttling personnel and supplies out to Quraqua, which Kosmik was terraforming. But he hadn't liked the people running the organization, who were both autocratic and incompetent. When it reached a point at which he was embarrassed to reveal for whom he worked, he'd resigned, done a brief stint as an instructor at Overflight, had seen an opportunity with the Academy, and had taken it.

Marcel was a Parisian, although he'd begun life on Pinnacle. He had been the second child born on an extrasolar planet. The first, a girl, also born on Pinnacle, had received all kinds of gifts, up to and including a free education.

"Let it be a lesson," his father had been fond of telling him. "Nobody remembers who Columbus's first mate was. Always go for the top job."

It had been a running joke between them, but Marcel had seen the wisdom in the remark, and now a variation of it hung over the desk in his quarters. Jump in or sit down. Not very poetic, but it reminded him to leave nothing to chance.

His father had been disappointed with the aimlessness of his adolescent years, and he'd died while Marcel was still adrift, undoubtedly convinced his wayward offspring would do nothing substantial with his life. He'd put Marcel into a small college at Lyon, where they specialized in recalcitrant students. And they'd introduced him to Voltaire.

It might have been his father's unexpected death, or Voltaire, or a math instructor in his sophomore year who unfailingly believed in him (for reasons Marcel never understood), or Valeric Guischard, who had told him point-blank she would not allow herself to become involved with a man with no future. Whatever had caused it, Marcel had decided to conquer the world.

He hadn't quite achieved that, but he was captain of a superlu-minal. He'd been too late to capture Valeric, but he knew no woman would ever again walk away from him because he had nothing to offer.

Starships, however, had turned out to be less romantic than he'd expected. His life, even with the Academy, had devolved into hauling passengers and freight from world to world with monotonous regularity. He'd hoped to pilot the survey ships that went out beyond the bubble, that went to places no one had ever seen before, like the Taliaferro, which had come out twenty-one years ago and found Morgan. That was the kind of life he wanted. But those were compact ships, and the pilots also tended to be part of the working crew. They were astrophysicists, exobiologists, climatologists, people who could carry their weight during a mission., Marcel could run the ship and in a pinch repair the coffeemaker. He was a skilled technician, one of the few pilots who could do major repairs under way. That skill counted for a great deal, but it was one more reason why the Academy liked him on flights that carried large numbers of passengers.

Marcel had found himself living a curiously uneventful life.

Until- Morgan.

Because the collision would be a head-on, a kind of cosmic train wreck, Maleiva 111 was not yet feeling the gravitational effects of the approaching giant. Nor was it yet more than a bright star in her skies. "Nothing much will change down there," Beekman predicted, "until the last forty hours or so. Then"-he rubbed his hands with anticipation-"Katie bar the door."

They were over the night side. Filmy clouds floated below them, limned by starlight. Here and there they could see oceans or snow-covered landmasses.

The Wendy jay was moving east in low orbit. It was early morning again aboard ship, but a substantial number of the researchers were up, crowded around the screens. They ate snacks and drank an endless supply of coffee in front of the displays, watching the sky brighten as the ship approached the terminator.

Marcel's crew consisted of two people. Mira Amelia was his technical specialist, and Kellie Collier was copilot. Kellie had taken the bridge when he went to bed. But sleeping had been difficult. There was too much excitement on the ship, and he hadn't dozed off until almost one. He woke again several hours later, tossed and turned for a while, gave it up, and decided to shower and dress. He'd developed a kind of morbid interest in the approaching fireworks. The realization irritated him because he'd always thought of himself as superior to those who gape at accidents.

He'd tried to convince himself that he was simply showing a scientific interest. But there was more to it than that. There was something that ran deep into the bone with the knowledge that an entire planetload of living things was going about their normal routines while disaster approached.

He turned on his monitor and picked up one of the feeds from project control. The screen filled with the endless arc of the ocean. A snow squall floated uncertainly off one edge of the cloud cover.

They were over snowcapped mountains, which in the distance subsided into an endless white plain.

It wasn't possible to see the Quiveras dust cloud. Even on the superluminal, they needed detectors to tell them it was there. Yet its effect had been profound. Take it away, and Maleiva III would have been a tropical world.

They were passing over a triangle-shaped continent, the largest on the planet. Vast mountain ranges dominated the northern and western coasts, and several chains of peaks formed an irregular central spine. The landmass stretched from about ten degrees north latitude almost to the south pole. Its southern limits were of course not visible to the naked eye because it simply connected with the mass of antarctic ice. Abel Kinder, one of the climatologists on board, had told him that even in normal times there was probably an ice bridge to the cap.

He found Beekman sitting in his accustomed chair on the bridge, charting with Kellie and drinking coffee. They were looking down as the last of the mountains passed out of the picture. A herd of animals moved deliberately across the plain.

"What are they?" Marcel asked.

Beekman shrugged. "Fur-bearing something-or-others," he said. "The local equivalent of reindeer. Except with white fur. Did you want me to bring up the archives?"

It wasn't necessary. Marcel had just been making conversation. He knew that the animals on Deepsix were by and large variations on well-established forms. They had all the usual organs, brains, circulatory systems, a tendency toward symmetry. A lot of exoskeletons here. Heavy bone on both sides of the wrapper. Most plants used chlorophyll.

Insects on Deepsix ranged all the way up to beasts the size of a German shepherd.

Detail was lacking because, as the whole world knew, the Nightingale expedition nineteen years ago had been attacked by local wildlife on its first day. No one had been on the ground since. Research had been limited to satellite observations.

"It's a pleasant enough world," said Beekman. "It would have made a good prospect for your old bosses."

He meant Kosmik, Inc., whose Planetary Construction Division selected and terraformed worlds for use as human outposts. "Too cold," said Marcel. "The place is a refrigerator."

"Actually it's not bad near the equator. And in any case it's only temporary. Another few centuries and it would have been away from the dust and everything would have gone back to normal."

"I don't think my old bosses were much at taking the long view."

Beekman shrugged. "There aren't that many suitable worlds available, Marcel. Actually, I think Deepsix would have been rather a nice place to take over."

The plains turned to forest and then to more peaks. Then they were out over the sea again.

Chiang Harmon called from project control to announce that the last of the general-purpose probes had been launched. In the background. Marcel heard laughter. And someone said, "Gloria-mundi."

"What's going on?" asked Beekman.

"They're naming the continents," said Chiang.

Marcel was puzzled. "Why bother? It isn't going to be here that long."

"Maybe that's why," said Kellie. Kellie was dark-skinned, attractive, something of a scholar. She was the only person Marcel knew who actually read poetry for entertainment. "You'll have a map when it's over. Seems as^if we ought to have some names to put on it."

Marcel and Beekman strolled over to project control to watch. Half the staff was there, shouting suggestions and arguing. One by one, Chiang was putting locations on-screen, not only continents but oceans and inland seas, mountain ranges and rivers, islands and capes.

The triangular continent over which they'd just passed became Transitoria. The others had already been named. They were Endtime, Gloriamundi, and Northern and Southern Tempus.

The great northern ocean they called the Coraggio. The others became the Nirvana, the Majestic, and the Arcane. The body-of water that separated Transitoria from the two Tempi (which were connected by a narrow neck of land) became the Misty Sea.

They continued with Cape Farewell and Bad News Bay, which pushed far down into northwestern Transitoria; and with Lookout Rock and the Black Coast and the Mournful Mountains.

In time they filled the map, lost interest, and drifted away. But not before Marcel had noticed a change in mood. It was difficult to single out precisely what had happened, even to be certain it wasn't his imagination. But the researchers had grown more somber, the laughter more restrained, and they seemed more inclined to stay together.

Marcel usually wasn't all that comfortable with Academy researchers. They tended to be caught up in their specialties, and they sometimes behaved as if anyone not interested in, say, the rate at which time runs in an intense gravity field is just not someone worth knowing. It wasn't deliberate, and by and large they tried to be sociable. But few of them were capable of hiding their feelings. Even the women seemed generally parochial.

Consequently, most evenings he retired early to his quarters and wandered through the ship's library. But this had been a riveting day, the first full day on station. The researchers were celebrating, and he did not want to miss any of it. Consequently he stayed until the last of them had put their dishes and glasses in the collector and gone, and then he sat studying Chiang's map.

It was not difficult to imagine Maleiva III as a human world. Port Umbrage established at the tip of Gloriamundi. The Irresolute Canal piercing the Tempi.

Even then he was not sleepy. After a while he went back to the bridge. The ship's AI was running things, and he got bored looking at the endless glaciers and oceans below, so he brought up a political thriller that he'd started the previous evening. He heard people moving about in the passageways. That was unusual, considering the hour, but he assigned it to the general electricity of the day.

He was a half hour into the book when his link chimed. "Marcel?" Beekman's voice.

"Yes, Gunther?"

"I'm back in project control. If you've a moment, we have something on-screen you might want to see."

There were about a dozen people gathered in front of several monitors. The same picture was on all of them: a forest with deep snow and something among the trees that looked like walls. It was hard to make out.

"We're at full mag," said Beekman.

Marcel made a face at the screen, as though it would clarify the image. "What is it?" he asked.

"We're not sure. But it looks like-"

"— A building." Mira Amelia moved in close. "Somebody's down there."

"It might just be filtered sunlight. An illusion."

They all stared at the monitor.

"I think it's artificial," said Beekman.