"Anderson, Poul - Fleet Of Stars (V2 0)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)
She gave him a new smile. “Fear not. I hold the balance here."
In other words, he thought, they'd see no point in worrying about a conspiracy; she can slap them down all by herself anytime she wants to. Or so she's claiming. I suppose I hope that's right. You're never quite sure with Lunarians. "I see. And, naturally, the two of us can clear away misunderstandings faster than a conference would. There must be some misunderstandings on both sides. Dialogue's kind of slow and awkward across light-years."
"Truly the waiting for you grew long," she sighed. "Also to me, who am not young."
"Easier for me. I... slept through it."
She gave him a narrow look. "You were able to."
Did she think of him as machine, rather than as transformed human? That could make for a terrible hindrance. He'd better explore attitudes a little before getting down to facts. "Lunarians can too, you know, if they want. We'd give any visitors to Beta Hydri a royal welcome."
The chill became unmistakable. “You should know that that will never happen."
Yes, he thought, he should, though more from the history he had witnessed than from word received since the last Terrans forsook Demeter. While Lunarians of Alpha Centauri had taken a leading part in the development of the field drive, no download of one had ever fared in a c-ship. Had any Lunarians ever downloaded at all, anywhere, for any reason?
Test the waters, he thought. She may get mad at me, but she won't kick me out, not when I might have something worth her while.
"I wasn't thinking of an existence like mine here," he said. "I was thinking of how we evacuated nearly everybody before the crash. Your traveler could do the same. Download but stay inactivated en route. Take along his genome specs. Amaterasu Mother would be happy to grow a flesh-and-blood body for him and reload his mind into it. Or hers, or theirs."
"You speak as if that can be done as easily as transcription of a recording. It is not so."
"Well, no, 'fraid not. And most likely it never will be."
"We need suckle no Life Mother, we who cringe not from Father Death."
Their sentiments haven't changed, Guthrie thought. Like their ancestors, they flat-out won't live the way they'd have to for rebirth, integral with a living world that's dominated by a person wiser and mightier than we will ever be, a quasi-goddess—no matter how loving she is or how much personal liberty she gives us. They can't endure having superiors. That must be a strong root of their hatred for the cybercosm at Sol.... The idea had passed through him, over and over, for centuries.
“My notion was that the adventure would be worth an emotional price," he said. "And afterward, the freedom of all space-time."
"But no freedom within."
More than once he had had to decide whether he would rather die on his feet or live on his knees, and had always chosen the first. Regardless, he knew he would never really understand this stark feeling of hers. Terran and Lunarian were two separate species—they couldn't even interbreed—and that was that.
"Pardon me," he yielded. "I hope I haven't said anything too distasteful. It's true, your travelers would be stuck amongst us, not having a Life Mother here to come back to. But how about you sending us a sophotect? It wouldn't just register data like a robot; it would have actual experiences to share with you when it returned."
Her lips tightened. "We have no sophotects. We will not." After a moment, as if seeking to reduce the tension: "They do keep some at Proserpina, but those are few, and severely limited. Our race has seen far too well that land to which a cybercosm would bring us."
Now we're getting to the point I was trying for! thought Guthrie. "You approach my main reason for coming here, my lady. You're in closer touch with Sol than any Terran colony can ever be. But we've gotten worried ourselves, you know. An alliance with you makes sense."
She took up her goblet again, stepped over to the well, and stared for a minute at the streaming stars before she looked his way again and replied, "Maychance there is a certain commonalty of interests. We must consider it together, you and I, I and my compeers."
"I don't expect you to empty a bucket of information over my head right away," Guthrie conceded. "And at first I'll be keeping my own cards pretty close to my vest, if you'll bear with the scrambled metaphors." She'd hardly recognize his reference to a long-forgotten game, but he expected that she would catch his drift. "However, today we can save time and trouble if you'll be so kind as to lay out what I'm bound to learn sooner or later. For my part, ask me whatever you want, and I'll give you either an honest answer or none."
She purred a laugh and came back toward him. "Your bluntness is arousing, Lord Guthrie. Much have I studied olden accounts and showings of you, yet this daycycle promises more pleasure than I envisioned."
"Thanks. Likewise." With a rueful interior grin: "It'd be still more fun for me if this self of mine were a man."
She probably has at least two husbands, phyle alliances—Guthrie thought—and God knows how many lovers. Hell on wheels in bed, I'll bet.
The longing to be human gripped him suddenly and cruelly. He pried it loose.
"Tell me, then, what you have in mind," Jendaire was . saying.
He spread his hands in lieu of a shrug. “That'll depend on what I learn here, and what help I can get from you people. Which is why I took the long way around instead of making straight for Sol."
A frown crossed the clear brow. "It would have been ill-advised, my lord," she said slowly.
"Maybe. Repeat, that's what I'm here to find out. If I can."
"Mean you that we might mislead you?" This time she didn't seem affronted. Well, to her, chicanery was perfectly okay. "What end of ours could deception serve?''
"None, I suppose, But you are, well, partisan. Unavoidably. Who isn't, one way or another? Look, though. You're in contact with Proserpina. Earth too?"
"With its Synesis and cybercosm?" Scornfully: "Nay, not at all. Liefer would we discover how close their contact is with us."
"Spy robots, you mean?"
"What else? We have detected a number of them in space, destroyed three, captured one."
A hunter's thrill cast the lingering regrets out of Guthrie. He kept his tone level. "Yeah, the cybercosm, even this Teramind your news to us has mentioned, it's bound by the laws of physics, hm? Instruments can only be so small if they're to do their jobs. What'd you learn from that prize you took?"
She spread her fingers. It corresponded to a shrug of her own. "Scant, I am told. The design is too alien. You shall talk with our scientists."
Yes, thought Guthrie, if the cybercosm hasn't shared all its technology with humans, what it's kept back is sure to be way in advance of theirs, maybe close to whatever limits nature sets. But as for those, well, for instance, you can't travel or transmit faster than light, not nohow, and we with our c-ships are pushing that. No, we aren't necessarily doomed. Nor necessarily destined to win.
"Surveillance doesn't have to mean hostility," he said. "I'd call it natural to want to know how we're doing."
"Then why have they not asked us?" she challenged.
"Yeah, Earth did break off communications a long time ago. Said there was no more point in it, as far apart as the societies had grown. Which never looked quite reasonable to me, but I figured, like most of us at the time, that sophotects and machine-partnered humans could have developed a very different psychology from us. Anyway, we had enough else to keep us busy."
"Nor did they ever respond," Jendaire pursued, "though well you must remember how the Centaurians called to them, over and over, before finally giving it up." She paused before stating: "Eyach, now the Pro-serpinans have begun. From them we have heard that in the Solar System the story was that we, the Centaurians, were those who broke off the discourse."
Guthrie was not surprised. "Yes, I figured that would be the case. If governments have no other reason to lie, they will from force of habit. But this particular flimflam suggests that something goddamn funny has been going on. Plus everything else you told us on the laser that the Proserpinans had told you—antimatter production starting up after a long hiatus, and what appear to be
"M-m-m.. . . Do they have field-drive ships by now?"
"They are beginning to. Twelve years agone"—that would be about fifteen of Earth's—"we decided to take whatever risk might lie in revealing to them the science and technology of it. A part of the risk was simply that while that immense volume of data was in transmission, scant bandwidth remained for aught else."
Guthrie's phantom self nodded; his turret could not. A bundle to send indeed. Sure, it'd become known already in his first lifetime that the vacuum is not passive emptiness; it roils with the creation and annihilation of virtual particles, its energy shapes the conformation and evolution of the universe. Laboratory observations had lent their evidence: the Lamb shift, the Casimir effect, he couldn't immediately recall what else—but how tiny, all of it, how insignificant. It seemed as though nothing less than the entire cosmos was big enough and endured long enough to feel the whole reality.... Had the freshness of new worlds—and new minds, new human species—and of ongoing spacefaring, had that been what brought a fresh insight, mathematics, theoretical investigation, empirical tests, devices, demonstrations, and suddenly the new ships? Interaction between the quantum states of matter and the quantum states of the vacuum—direct thrust, momentum still conserved, but the momentum of the plenum—no more need for jets and their horrible wastefulness—
When first he heard about the possibility, Guthrie had in imagination reached back to shake the hand of an unknown prehistoric man, paddling his dugout, who thought to raise something that would catch the wind.
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