"Anderson, Poul - Genesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

Morning approached, but slowly. Between sunrise and sunrise, 176 terrestrial rotations passed. Not that the men here had ever gazed directly at a sunlit landscape on Mercury. Though a darkened pane might bring the brightness down to something endurable, other radiation would strike through. Their machines above ground ranged for them. Most of these were robots, with different degrees of autonomy. One was more.
Gimmick never knew darkness. Across five hundred kilometers, Christian saw by laserlight, radarlight, amplified starlight. He felt with fingers and tendrils of metal, with sensors in the treads as the body rolled across the regolith, with subtle seismics. He tasted and smelled with flickery beams of electrons and nuclear particles. He listened electronically to whispers of radioactivity from the rock around and to the hiss and spatter of cosmic rain. Interior sensors kept him subliminally aware of balances, flows, needs, as nerves and glands did in his own body. Together, he and Gimmick made observations and decisions, like his brain alone in its skull; they moved the machine as his muscles moved himself.
Rapport was not total. It could only be so in line-of-sight. Relay, whether by satellite or by spires planted along the way, inevitably reduced the bandwidth and degraded the signal. Christian remained dimly conscious of his surroundings, the recliner in which he lay connected, meters and instruments, air odorless and a little chilly, tensions and casings-instinctive responses, which sometimes made him strain against his bonds. From the corner of an eye he glimpsed Willem Schuyten seated at a control console, monitoring what went on. That had seldom been necessary elsewhere, Christian thought vaguely. Or, at least, he'd avoided it. But this was a team effort, and on Mercury the unknowns were many and the stakes high.
It was just half a minute's distraction, while Gimmick did some data analysis that he couldn't follow. A certain direction of search seemed promising, and the explorer set off again. Christian's whole attention returned to the scene.
Heaven glimmered and shimmered, its manifold brilliances arcing down to a horizon that on the left was near and sharp. Craters pocked the murky terrain, boulders lay strewn. When he glanced at any, he could tell its age within a few million years, as he could tell the age of a person or a tree on Earth; the clues were countless, the deductions subconscious. Close on the right a scarp four kilometers high, hundreds of kilometers long, loomed like a wall across the world. The enhancement that was Christian-Gimmick perceived it as more than rock. He noted traces as he went along; brain and computer joined to read the history, the tale of a gigantic upthrust along a fault line long ago when the planet was still cooling and shrinking after its birth.
He spied possibilities in something ahead.
Gimmick was following the cliff southwesterly, back toward the polar region where Clement waited. Rubble scrunched beneath the treads, soundlessly to human ears; dust smoked up and fell quickly down, under low gravity but unhindered by air. It did not cling to the robot, whose material repelled it.
There, Christian thought, that crag yonder. Maybe a good anchor point. We'll have a look. The partnership veered slightly and trundled nearer the heights. Debris lay deep here. Shards slipped aside. Motors labored. He considered deploying the six legs but decided that wasn't needful.
The peak sheered out of a lower slope above the rubble, a rough-edged hundred-meter obelisk. He had seen others as he traveled, though none so large. Probably shock-wave resonances in the age of uplift had split them from the massif.
He visualized this one as an almost ready-made core for a transmission tower, part of the global network that was to collect the solar energy cataracting down onto Mercury's dayside and hurl it out to orbiting antimatter factories-ultimately, to the laser beams that would send the first starships on their way! Passion thrummed in him.
A quick structural exam. The self-robots can map the details later. A disc at the end of an arm snugged tightly. Vibrations through stone returned their echoes, bearing tales.
The stone gave way. Thunder and blindness crashed down.


2


"Wat drommel?" Willem Schuyten cried. He went back to the expedition's English. "What the hell?" After a glance at the other man's face: "Hell indeed."
"N-no." Secured in the system, Christian Brannock could neither lift a braceleted arm nor shake his helmeted head. His voice shuddered. "Hold on. Keep going. Let me try to find out-what's happened-"
Willem nodded and concentrated on his instruments. Grown gray in the artificial intelligence field, he could make inferences from these readings and computations that might well escape an on-site observer.
Shards and tatters of input went through Christian like a nightmare, blackness, deafness, crushing heaviness, powers lost, strength in ebb. Instinct panicked; his flesh struggled against the restraints. But somehow his mind clung to the steadiness that was Gimmick's. Together they tried to interpret what little the sensors gave them.
Those fitful moments of reality turned more and more chaotic. They weakened, too, until he could not make out whatever form they still had.
The linkage is failing fast. Better break it altogether and start work. Christian never knew whether the decision was his alone or rooted also in his partner's calm logic. Nor did he know or care why it ended with: So long. Good luck.
"Terminate," he rasped aloud.
"Terminate," Willem repeated. He swept a glance and a judgment across the gauges, deemed that an immediate breakoff was neurologically safe, and pressed the command button. Voice-activated, the communication center could have done everything by itself, but a human in the loop was an added precaution. He could better tell what another human required.
All channels shut down. The neuroconnectors released Christian. He lay for a minute breathing hard, then sat up. Willem stood above him with a tumbler of water. Christian drained it in two gulps. "Thanks," he mumbled. "Dry as yon landscape, my mouth was."
"Terror will do that," his companion replied. "I saw your involuntary reactions. Want a levozine?"
Christian half grinned, without merriment. "What I really want is a stiff drink. But we're in a hurry. Yes, I'll take a pill."
Willem gave him one. Some was always on hand, in case a mission got unexpectedly long or difficult and the operator could not stop to rest. "In a hurry, you said? Do you mean there is something we can do at once?"
Christian nodded. "We'd bloody well better." He climbed to his feet. The medication began to tranquilize and stimulate. His trembling died away, his voice gained force. "Whew! Hope I can snatch a shower during preparations. I smell six weeks dead, don't I?" Sweat sheened on his skin and darkened his shirt.
Willem regarded him narrowly. "My monitors say the machine is a ruin. The transceiver's badly damaged. It can carry some information, erratically, but the power unit's out of commission. Anything that could perhaps function, like an arm, can't anymore. And the energy reserve is dwindling fast."
"Gimmick's intact."
Willem sighed. "Yes, evidently. That hurts, doesn't it?" He had often heard such highly developed computers and neural nets, with their programs and databases, called "brains." People who worked with one, like Christian-although seldom as intimately as he did-were apt to give it a name and speak of its personal quirks, as other people might speak of a ship or a tool that had served them a long time. "I imagine you'd prefer the wreck to have been quick and total. Merciful, so to speak. That would have been a shock to you, however, worse than you got."
"I know. Like suddenly dying myself. I'd have recovered. But this way-My God, man, Gimmick's out there, not a heap of smashed parts but Gimmick! And sunrise is coming."
Willem sighed. "Exactly. Have you any idea what happened?"
The question, its style carefully parched, demanded an answer in kind. Christian's fists unclenched. "We were examining an unusual sort of crag. All at once it broke into huge chunks. It buried Gimmick." His tone sharpened. "The body Gimmick was using." Again impersonal: "The top of the transceiver mast, with the dish, is sticking out, and what came to me shows that the interior armor protected the brain."
"Are you sure? It could be in poor shape too."
Christian shook his head. "No. Do you believe I wouldn't know that, feel it, same as I would if my own brain took a concussion?"
"All right. But the accident-how could a collapse happen? An earthquake?"
"No." Christian spoke with certainty. He had, in a way, been there. "Nor a meteorite strike. Somehow our seismic probe must have touched things off. I don't see how. You know it didn't have any great force. And, and Mercury's geologically used up. That jut of rock stood unchanged for-what?-three billion years?"
"A freak occurrence, then."
"Maybe. Or maybe such formations and weaknesses are common. How much do we know? Why the devil are we on Mercury, except to get the lay of the land? Before something like this happens elsewhere-"
Christian drew breath and forced coolness upon himself. "I was only in linkage with Gimmick. The full information isn't in me, it's in his database. If we don't retrieve him before sunrise, everything will be baked and blasted to nothing."
"I suppose so. Thermostatic system destroyed and the rocks probably not a good replacement for smashed radiation shielding." Willem laid a hand on his friend's shoulder. "I'm sorry. Dreadful luck. Worse for you than the expedition, perhaps. This association you've grown used to, this particular rapport you've developed, gone. You'll have to start all over, won't you?" He regarded the creases in the face, the fallowness in the blond hair. "Unless you choose to make a career change, or just retire. I'm sorry, Christian."
The response lashed at him: "No! There's time to go dig, detach Gimmick from the wreckage, get back here. But we've got to move, I tell you!"
"I ... am afraid not. Let me check and make sure." Willem turned to his keyboards and readouts. Christian stood where he was. His fists doubled again.
After a while the cyberneticist looked at him and said slowly:
"No. I've gathered the present whereabouts of everything we have with proper capability," self-programming robots surveying and studying the planet in advance of the grand enterprise. Christian's had been the only direct human-machine alliance, expensive in terms of life support and equipment, rewarding in terms of special situations calling for an organic mind on the scene. "They're scattered across the globe, remember. Even the nearest has rough terrain to cross. None can get there soon enough."
Christian had become quite composed. "I guessed so. Well, it isn't too far from here. I'll go myself."