"Allen, Roger MacBride - Chronicles Of Solace 2 - Ocean Of Years" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Roger Macbride)

I have great good to offer, prizes of knowledge and technology that I alone can
give… but much of what I can offer will not be accepted willingly. Drastic ideas
will not be possible until the situation is desperate.…
Seek me out. I live, but slumber. I am hidden, but hidden where you can find me.
Find me, and together, we can do great things.
… Hate me, forgive me. Feel what you will toward me, and I will accept it. There
are larger matters at stake, and my own guilt and shame do not matter.
Only one thing does matter.
Seek me out.
With heartfelt respect,
I remain
Your sincere admirer
Dr. Oskar DeSilvo



Neshobe Kalzant set the pages of the letter down on her desk. She looked at the
man who stood before her, at Admiral Anton Koffield. “Who knows about this
let­ter?” she asked.
“You. Me. Wandella Ashdin, Norla Chandray, and Captain Marquez. No one else. The
various support people know we found something, of course. They just don’t know
what.”
Neshobe swiveled her chair about to stare out at the endless rain.
Oskar DeSilvo, the man who had written the letter, had designed the Diamond
Office they were in, the man­sion of which it was a part, and the city that
formed the view seen from it. That is to say, the view she would be seeing right
now, if not for the endless rain. In a sense, DeSilvo had made the rain as well.
DeSilvo had directed the terraforming of Solace—and, according to the letter,
had not had the courage to admit that fundamental flaws in the process had made
it a predictable, mathematical certainty that the planet’s climate and ecology
would collapse. Always rain where you don’t need it, and never where you do.
That was the Solacian proverb meaning nothing ever went right. The weather
problems were bad enough, and persistent enough, to shape the words peo­ple
lived by.
Here it was rain. Sure as rain in Solace City. That was another proverb.
Elsewhere it was killing droughts, or coastal inundation, or massive algae
blooms. Everywhere, the climate was unraveling.
“You believe him,” she said to her visitor. It was not a question. She spoke
without turning around, and kept staring out the window.
“Yes,” said Anton Koffield.
“And the climate projections?” She couldn’t bring herself to say the rest of
it—the climate projections that say the planet will collapse.
“Confirmed and reconfirmed, over and over again,” Koffield replied.
At last she spun about in her chair. “So there is no hope,” she said, “except
for what a genocidal maniac of­fers us from a hundred years in the past. And he
won’t give us what he has—whatever that might be—unless you go and find him
first.”
“Yes. He implies that faster-than-light travel is the least of it. But Dr.
DeSilvo has been prone to exaggerate in the past.”
There was understatement for you. “And in spite what he’s put you through, you