"Benford G - Tides of Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

It was the only place where he could feel truly alone. Inside Argo there was always the rustle of movement, the rub of humanity
kept two years in the narrow though admittedly pleasant
confines of a starship.
And worse, when he was inside, someone could always interrupt
him. The Family was getting better at leaving him alone in
the early morning, he had to give them that. He had carefully
built up a small legend about his foul temper just after he awoke,
and it was beginning to pay off. Though children might still rush
up to him and blurt out a question, lately there had always been
an adult nearby to tug the offending youth away.
Killeen disliked using implied falsehoods--he was no more
irritable in the morning than at any other time but it was the
only way he could think to get some privacy. So no one hailed him
over ship's comm when he was out here. And of course, no ship's
officer would dare pass through the lock and seek to join him.
And now there was a much better reason not to come out
here. Hull-walking just made you a better target beneath the
ever-watching eyes above.
Out here. Killeen had been thinking so firmly about his problems
that he had, as was often the case, completely forgotten to
admire the view. Or to locate their enemy escort.
His first impression, as he raised his head to let in all the
sweep of light around him, was of a seething, cloud-shrouded sky.
He knew this was an illusion, that this was no planetary sky at all,
and that the burnished hull of the Argo was no horizon.
But the human mind persisted in the patterns learned as a


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Gregory Benford


child. The glowing washes of blue and pink, ivory and burnt
orange, were not clouds in any normal sense. Their phosphorescence
came from entire suns they had engulfed. They were not
water vapor, but motley swarms of jostling atoms. They spilled
forth light because they were being intolerably stimulated by the
stars they blanketed.

And no sky back on Snowglade had ever crackled with the
trapped energy that flashed fitfully between these clouds. Killeen
watched a sprinkle of bluehot light near a large, orange blob. Its
wobbly curves fattened like ribbed, bruised sausages. It coiled,
clotted seintillant ridges working with snakelike torpor, and then
burst into luridly tortured fragments.

Could this be the weather of the stars? Snowglade had suffered
from a elimate that could turn suddenly vicious, and Killeen
supposed the same could be true on the unimaginably larger scale
between suns. Since he didn't understand the way planets made