"David Brin - Lungfish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

civilizations. Once their own replicas had been launched, the newcomers joined
a small but growing community of mechanical ambassadors to this backwater
system -- waiting for it to evolve somebody to say hello to.

Ursula felt the poignancy of the image: the lonely machines, envoys of creators perhaps
long extinct -- or evolved past caring about the mission they had charged upon their loyal
probes. The faithful probes reproduced themselves, saw their progeny off, then began their
long watch, whiling away the slow turning of the spiral arms....

We have found a few of these early probes, remnants of a lost age of innocence
in the galaxy.
More precisely, we have found their blasted remains.
Perhaps one day the innocent star emissaries sensed some new entity enter the
solar system. Did they move to greet it, eager for gossip to share? Like those
twentieth century thinkers, perhaps they believed that replicant probes would
have to be benign.
But things had changed. The age of innocence was over. The galaxy had grown
up; it had become nasty.
The wreckage we are finding now -- whose salvage drives our new industrial
revolution -- was left by an unfathomable war that stretched across vast
times, and was fought by entities to whom biological life was a nearly
forgotten oddity.

"Uh, you there Urs?"
Ursula looked up as the radio link crackled. She touched the send button.
"Yes, Gavin. Have you found something interesting?"
There was a brief pause.
"Yeah, you could say that," her partner said sardonically. "You may want to let Hairy pilot
himself for a while, and hurry your pretty little biological butt down here to take a look."
Ursula bit back her own sharp reply, reminding herself to be patient. Even in humans,
adolescence didn't last forever.
At least not usually.
"I'm on my way," she told him.
The ship's semi-sentient autopilot accepted command as she hurried into her spacesuit,
still irritated by Gavin's flippance.
Everything has its price, she thought. Including buying into the future. Gavin's type of
person is new and special, and allowances must be made.
 In the long run, our culture will be theirs, so that in a sense it will be we who continue,
and grow, long after DNA has become obsolete.
So she reminded herself.
Still, when Gavin called again and inquired sarcastically what bodily function had delayed
her, Ursula couldn't quite quash a faint regret for the days when robots clanked, and
computers simply followed orders.

5
Ah, the words have the flavor of youth itself.
I reach out and tap the little ship's computers, easily slipping through their primitive
words to read the journal of the ship's master... the musings of a clever little Maker.
"Words," they are so quaint and biological, unlike the seven dimensional gestalts used for
communication by most larger minds.