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

come from oxidization of the primitive rock as it had been exposed to air.
The implications were staggering. Something organic had come from the stars!
Although all humans were equal before the law, the traditional biological kind still
dominated culture in the solar system. Many of the younger Class AAAs looked to the future,
when their descendants would be the majority, the leaders, the star-treaders. To them, the
discovery of the alien probes in the asteroid belt had been a sign. Of course something terrible
seemed to have happened to the great robot envoys from the stars, but they still testified
that the galaxy belonged to metal and silicon.
They were the future.
But here, deep in the planetoid, was an exception!
Ursula poked through the wreckage, under walls carved out of carbonaceous rock.
Mammoth explosions had shaken the habitat, and even in vacuum little had been preserved
from so long ago. Still, she could tell that the machines in this area were different from any
alien artifacts they had found before.
She traced the outlines of intricate separation columns. "Chemical processing facilities...
and not for fuel or cryogens, but for complex organics!"
Ursula hop-skipped quickly from chamber to chamber as Gavin followed sullenly. A pack of
semi-sent robots from the ship accompanied them, like dogs sniffing a trail. In each new
chamber they snapped and clicked and scanned. Ursula accessed the data on her helmet
display as it came available.
"Look there! In that chamber the drones report traces of organic compounds that have no
business being here. There's been heavy oxidation, within a super-reduced asteroid!"
She hurried to an area where the drones were already setting up lights. "See these
tracks? They were cut by flowing water!" She knelt and pointed. "They had a stream, feeding
recycled water into a little lake there!
Dust sparkled as it slid through her gloved fingers "I'll wager this was topsoil! And look!
stems! From plants, and grass, and trees!"
"Put here for aesthetic purposes," Gavin proposed. "We class AAA's are predesigned to
enjoy nature as much as you biologicals...."
"Oh, posh!" Ursula laughed. "That's only a stopgap measure until we're sure you'll keep
thinking of yourselves as human beings. Nobody expects to inflict a love of New England
autumns on people when we become starships! Anyway, a probe could fulfill that desire simply
by focusing a telescope on the Earth!"
She stood up and spread her arms. "This habitat was meant for biological creatures! Real,
living aliens!"
Gavin frowned, but said nothing.
"Here," Ursula pointed as they entered another chamber. "Here is where the biological
creatures were made! Don't these machines resemble those artificial wombs they're using on
Luna now?"
Gavin shrugged grudgingly.
"Maybe the organic creatures were specialized units," he suggested, "intended to work
with volatiles. Or perhaps the type of starprobe that built this facility needed some element
from the surface of a planet like Earth, and created workers equipped to go get it."
Ursula laughed. "It's an idea. That'd be a twist, hmmm? Machines making biological units to
do what they could not? And of course there's no reason it couldn't happen that way.
"Still, I doubt it."
"Why?"
She turned to face her partner. "Because almost anything available on Earth you can
synthesize more easily in space. Anyway..."
Gavin interrupted. "Explorers! The probes were sent out to explore and acquire knowledge.