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

colony, on a world that seemed made for cetaceans. A world whose comfort was the surest
way to clinch a rapid devolution of their disciplined minds. Without constant challenges, the
Whale Dream would surely reclaim them. Brookida seemed to accept the notion with an ease
that disturbed Makanee.
"We still have patrons," she pointed out. "There are humans living right here on Jijo."
"Humans, yes. But uneducated, lacking the scientific skills to continue guiding us. So our
only remaining option must be --"
He stopped, having at last picked up that rising sound from the west. Makanee recognized
the unique hum of a speed sled.
"It is Tkett," she said. "Returning from his scouting trip. Let's go hear what he found out."
Thrashing her flukes, Makanee jetted to the surface, spuming the moist, stale air from her
lungs and drawing in a deep breath of sweet oxygen. Then she spun about and kicked off
toward the engine noise, with Brookida following close behind.
In their wake, the school of grazing fishoids barely rippled in its endless, sinuous dance,
darting in and out of luminous shoals, feeding on whatever the good sea pressed toward them.

The archaeologist had his own form of mental illness -- wishful thinking.
Tkett had been ordered to stay behind and help Makanee with the reverted ones, partly
because his skills weren't needed in Streaker's continuing desperate flight across the known
universe. In compensation for that bitter exile, he had grown obsessed with studying the
Great Midden, that deep underwater trash heap where Jijo's ancient occupants had dumped
nearly every sapient-made object when this planet was abandoned by starfaring culture, half
a million years ago.
"I'll have a wonderful report to submit when we get back to Earth," he rationalized, in
apparent confidence that all their troubles would pass, and eventually he would make it home
to publish his results. It was a special kind of derangement, without featuring any sign of
stress-atavism or reversion. Tkett still spoke Anglic perfectly. His work was flawless and his
demeanor cheerful. He was pleasant, functional, and mad as a hatter.
Makanee met the sled a kilometer west of the pod, where Tkett pulled up short in order
not to disturb the patients. "Did you find any traces of Peepoe?" she asked when he cut the
engine.
Tkett was a wonderfully handsome specimen of Tursiops amicus, with speckled mottling
along his sleek gray flanks. The permanent dolphin-smile presented twin rows of perfectly
white, conical teeth. While still nestled on the sled's control platform, Tkett shook his sleek
gray head left and right.
"Alas, no. I went about two hundred klicks, following those faint traces we picked up on
deep-range sonar. But it grew clear that the source wasn't Zhaki's sled."
Makanee grunted disappointment. "Then what was it?" Unlike the clamorous sea of Earth,
this fallow planet wasn't supposed to have motor noises permeating its thermal-acoustic
layers.
"At first I started imagining all sorts of unlikely things, like sea monsters, or Jophur
submarines," Tkett answered. "Then the truth hit me."
Brookida nodded nervously, venting bubbles from his blowhole. "Yessssss?"
"It must be a starship. An ancient, piece-of-trash wreck, barely puttering along --"
"Of course!" Makanee thrashed her tail. "Some of the decoys didn't make it into space."
Tkett murmured ruefully over how obvious it now seemed. When Streaker made its
getaway attempt, abandoning Makanee and her charges on this world, the earthship fled
concealed in a swarm of ancient relics that dolphin engineers had resurrected from trash
heaps on the ocean floor. Though Jijo's surface now was a fallow realm of savage tribes, the
deep underwater canyons still held thousands of battered, abandoned spacecraft and other