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

want to go after him.” Or, more likely, because of it. DeSilvo had done a lot to
Koffield, and done most of it from a distance. He had in effect framed Koffield
for the destruction of the Circum Central wormhole. When Koffield had discovered
that the planet Solace, DeSilvo’s masterpiece, was doomed to failure, he had
taken passage aboard the Dom Pedro IV to fly to Solace and deliver a warning.
But DeSilvo had stolen Koffield’s evidence off the ship, sabotaged the DP-IV,
kept it from flying through a timeshaft, and ma­rooned the ship and crew 127
years in the future—all in the interests, so DeSilvo claimed, of preventing the
panic Koffield’s “false” warning would produce. Unfortu­nately, the warning was
proving to be all too accurate. “Or do you want to go?” Neshobe asked.
“I don’t feel as if I have a great deal of choice. We must find out what
technology he has found. He has a faster-than-light drive. He implies there is
more—but FTL travel, all by itself, could change everything. Every­thing. Yes,
there is a chance that it’s a fraud, a trick. But if it’s real—then millions
more might be saved who oth­erwise could not be evacuated.”
Neshobe nodded. There were endless questions, any number of ways that FTL might
prove useless, or prove to be a fraud. But the chance was well worth taking.
“Agreed. You must find DeSilvo.”
She turned her gaze back toward her desk, toward other objects pulled from
DeSilvo’s false tomb. Books and a datacube. The datacube was in fact the cube
that Koffield had intended to bring to Solace. It was the very cube DeSilvo had
stolen. DeSilvo had, apparently, placed it in the funerary urn as a sort of
confession of his guilt. One of the printed books contained the same data as the
cube. The other three books were by Ulan Baskaw—an author Neshobe had never
heard of, before all this had started. She had died centuries before DeSilvo was
born—but still he had managed to steal from her, as well, plagiarizing her
books—the books that now sat be­fore Neshobe. He had used them as a guide for
terraforming Solace—but had ignored all the warnings they contained, the proofs
that the technique had to fail. “These books,” she said, putting her hand on the
titles by Baskaw. “These copies of these books. Where are they from?”
“It’s more a question of when are they from,” said Koffield. “They have printing
dates showing they were printed off 110 years ago, and chemical analyses of
vari­ous sorts confirm that.”
“So these aren’t the originals.”
“No. Presumably those are still in the Permanent Physical Collection.” The PPC
was a gigantic space habi­tat, a huge cylindrical space station, orbiting
Neptune, back in the Solar System. In it were stored physical printed copies of
every book the collectors could obtain. Nearby, also in the orbit of Neptune,
was the PPC’s dig­ital equivalent, the Grand Library. DeSilvo had erased
Baskaw’s books from the GL’s digital equivalent—but he had forgotten to destroy
the PPC’s physical copies.
“So the copies you read, you consulted, are still sitting on a shelf in a giant
library orbiting Neptune.”
“Presumably.”
“Good,” said Neshobe. “Very good. Because I—we— have other problems. I’ve
discussed your information, your evidence, your warnings, with the leaders of
all the major parties, and all the other power factions. All very quiet. No one
wants it to leak prematurely. Half of them don’t believe any of it. Mostly the
spaceside people, who don’t experience the weather problems, and would get
buried in refugees one way or another if we evacuated the planet.”