"Anderson, Poul - Fleet Of Stars (V2 0)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

She heard, but her thoughts stayed on course. "The ancestors on Demeter, and your download, and Kyra's and Eiko's Demeter Mother wasn't in being, not yet, they saw this coming, didn't they? Back when the people in the Solar System stopped transmitting because they claimed they'd grown too different from our kind of humans. ... But they didn't foresee Proserpina. Nobody could have. The Lunarians at Centauri must be happy about that."
"Yes and no. The Proserpinans themselves aren't happy any longer. At least, one thing that nudged them into trying to reestablish contact, even though they know Demeter hasn't got much time left, one thing was the machines, the cybercosm, whatever you call it the system that rules over Sol's planets in all but name it never wanted that Proserpina colony. That's what the message says, anyhow. A wild card, a chaos factor, the long-term consequences unpredictable and uncontrollable. The cybercosm did its best to keep the existence of the asteroid secret; then when the news got out, it tried to discourage migration there; then when that happened regardless, it tried to keep the colony tiny and isolated; and now lately-
"Of course, this is the Proserpinans' side of the story, as filtered through the Lunarians at Centauri. Prejudiced, no doubt. Just the same"
"Yes?" she urged softly.
"Well, they speak of something new being suppressed, hints of a tremendous discovery made by a solar gravitational lens way out in space, denials of this that don't quite ring true. And when they tried to set up a lens of their own, the effort failed, and they're convinced that it was sabotage."
She frowned. Paranoia was foreign to her. "Need it have been?"
"I suppose not. Still, judging by what we've received, the cybercosm seems quite well-informed about goings-on at Proserpina, distant and lonely though it is." Guthrie did not frown, he scowled, and his tone harshened. "Which does suggest to me that the cybercosm and its people weren't entirely truthful when they broke off communications with us out here, claiming there could be no more shared interests. It could've had its spy robots at Centauri all along. They could be in this system right now, mini jobs we'd likely never detect unless we knew exactly what to scan for." He made a chopping gesture. "Be that as it may, the Proserpinans report they've run surveillance missions through the inner Solar System and found that antimatter production has started up again on Mercury."
"It had ceased?"
"Yes, for a long time. A stable economy, which Earth and Luna had reached, didn't need any energy source so concentrated, and a plentiful reserve was stored in orbit. But now resumed,Could it be to power c-ships? The Proserpinans also report detecting signs of what they strongly suspect are spacecraft of some exotic kind, leaving the Solar System at bat-out-of-hell speeds, or once in a while entering it."
She stared into the sunset. It was swiftly losing color, the sky above the clouds going from blue to violet. "We didn't think they ever would, the machines," she breathed.
"Naw," he agreed. "I figured those great minds were too concerned with their fancy mind-games-theory, math, esoteric abstract art forms, contemplating their electrophotonic navels. Maybe I was wrong."
She shivered. "What would, what could it-the, the Teramind-desire?"
"Queen sabe? But if it is setting out to plant cyber-cosms in the galaxy, then machines can expand their range a lot faster and more thoroughly than life can, you know."
A point of light blinked forth in the west; dusk had advanced enough that Amaterasu's moon had become visible there. Day drowned the weak, fitful gleam of a fifty-kilometer rock, a captured asteroid. Artificial satellites often shone brighter. Guthrie missed Lunalight. He had missed it on Demeter too, but there Alpha Centauri B, the companion sun, blazed brilliant, from two hundred to two thousand times the radiance.
Life missed it worse, he reflected fleetingly. Without a freakishly huge moon like Luna to stabilize it, the spin axis of an otherwise Earthlike planet was apt to wander chaotically, with consequences falling anywhere between a runaway glaciation and a runaway greenhouse. Without something gigantic like Jupiter to deflect smaller bodies, the planet would be subject to relentless bombardment, a KT-type event not every few scores of millions of years, but every few thousand. And the many other parameters that had to be right for the miracle to happen-
No wonder life was so heartbreakingly rare in the universe (in that infinitesimal minim of the universe we know) and intelligence might well have arisen only on Earth out of all creation.... Amaterasu, like Demeter and Isis, was extraordinary. There evolution had gotten to photosynthesizing organisms that produced an atmosphere humans could breathe. Yes, ships had also reached Hestia, akin to them, and its fantastic neighbor Bion, but the sun of those two worlds lay far and far....
His Demeter was reproaching him: "You shouldn't say that. Anything that acts, thinks, feels, is aware-it's alive."
He spread his palms. "As you like. A semantic question. I mean organic life, then. Our kind."
"The difference isn't absolute, you know."
Most certainly and deeply he knew. Had he not witnessed the coming into existence of Demeter Mother, and afterward of Amaterasu Mother, while other Guthries were present at the geneses of Isis Mother and Hestia Mother? What but cybernetic technology had allowed, the downloading of those patterns that were human personality into organometallic matrices, and their joining to form something immensely more than the sum of them, and its fostering and guidance of nature everywhere around a whole world? "No, no, sure, of course not," he said. "I've been a sort of machine myself, after all. Nevertheless-"
"Need the cybercosm be any threat to us?" she pursued. "Why not a friend? Aren't the humans, the Ter-rans, on Earth and Luna and Mars happy?"
"Pet animals generally are," he snapped. After a moment: "Sorry. Never mind. The situation's doubtless nothing like that simple. And the Lunarians, those wildcats, it might actually be a good idea to keep 'em curbed. I dunno. Certainly what we've gotten is an edited extract from an original message that must itself be one-sided, tendentious, incomplete, and full of superstitions. We'll have to study it and study it, and then I think we'll still be puzzled."
He paused. The last hues drained from the clouds, and dusk thickened with subtropical haste. She drew her cloak about her against the wind. He ignored it.
"I don't think we can afford puzzlement, though," he said at length. "Not when the stakes are as high as this."
" 'This?' "
"The entire universe and future. Yeah, that may be exaggerated. But I don't propose to sit idle waiting for whatever wants to come along."
"What can you do?" She divined his meaning. Dismay moaned, "Oh, no."
He nodded. "You guessed it. I'd better get back there and try to find out."
"Over those distances, into that unknown? Anson, An-son!" She gripped his arm. "Somebody else," she pleaded. "We've plenty of brave men and women."
His tone went gentle. "I am the jefe, darling." She understood full well everything he would say, but he must say it. "We call this a republic, and I've done my damnedest to keep us simply two citizens of it,so have you-but it can't be helped; we are what we are." The eternal hero, the incarnation of the Life Mother. "No decent comandante sends his men into risks he won't take himself."
She rallied. "I should have known it of you. I did. Always I did."
He attempted a laugh. "Anyhow, not me, you realize. I aim to live out my days here with you, making love and raising Cain till our great-grandchildren finally and with relief scatter our ashes and compose our mendacious obituaries after which we'll scandalize them afresh in our new bodies."
"A download of you. Yes, that's clear. But he-"
"He won't thank me? He might, sort of. It's bound to be quite an adventure."
"That whole enormous way, alone."
"Not straight to Sol. At the moment, I reckon my- his best bet will be to first go back to Centauri and confer with the Lunarians there. By that time, they should have lots more information."
"But that adds light-years to the journey," she protested. “Even in a c-ship" Her voice faltered. "You- he will get to Centauri after Demeter is destroyed."
He winced. "Uh-huh. That hurts. However, the Lunarians should be okay on their asteroids, mostly. In fact, they should be able to outfit my alter ego for the trip on to Sol. He'll arrive in style, loaded for bear."
"Do you mean he'll make that leg in a cruiser? But it will take decades longer!"
"What's a few decades more or less, given the scale of space-time?"
Guthrie was mute for another while. Stars were appearing now in the west as well as the east. Among them he recognized Sol. It glimmered insignificant, about fourth magnitude, near Ursa Minor. Twenty light-years, an abyss denumerable but unimaginable by humans, was too small a reach in the galaxy to affect constellations much. But Polaris was not the lodestar of Amaterasu.
He rose. Light from above, in this clear air, and light cast off the sea were ample to find one's way by. "Let's go home," he proposed.
"I would like some closeness and comfort," she admitted.
"You know," he said, "I can hope that in the end, maybe a hundred years from tonight, my download will come back here and get reborn." He stroked her hair. "And there'll be a you for him."
She tried to speak as cheerfully. "By then he may well find this planet entirely green."
"That's our goal, isn't it?" he said. "What the travel and labor are for. Homes, elbow room, personal gain, yeah, but way down the pike, the object of the game is to make the universe come alive."
Unspoken with our kind of life.


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