"David Brin - The Crystal Spheres" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

Thousands of excited men and women had clustered around an asteroid ship half the
size of the little moon itself, taking aboard a virtual ark of hopeful would-be
colonists, their animals, and their goods.
Those early explorers knew they would never see their final destination. But they
were not sad. They suffered from no great-depression. Those people launched forth
in their so-primitive first starship full of hope for their great-grandchildren--and for
the world which their sensitive telescopes had proved circled, green and pleasant,
around the star Tau Ceti.
Ten thousand waityears later, I looked out at the mammoth Yards of Charon as
we passed overhead. Rank on serried rank of starships lay berthed below. Over the
millennia, thousands had been built, from generation ships and hiberna-barges to
ram-shippers and greatstrutted wormhole-divers.
They all lay below, all except the few that were destroyed in accidents, or whose
crews killed themselves in despair. They had all come back to Charon, failures.
I looked at the most ancient hulks, the generation ships, and thought about the
day of my grandfather's youth, when the Seeker cruised blithely over the Edge, and
collided at one percent of light speed with the inner face of Sol's crystalsphere.
They never knew what hit them, that firstcrew.
They had begun to pass through the outermost shoals of the solar system... the
Oort Cloud, where billions of comets drifted like puffs of snow in the sun's
weakened grasp.
Seeker's instruments sought through the sparse cloud, touching isolated, drifting
balls of ice. The would-be colonists planned to keep busy doing science throughout
the long passage. Among the questions they wanted to solve on their way was the
mystery of the comets' mass.
Why was it, astronomers had asked for centuries, that virtually all of these icy
bodies were nearly the same size--a few miles across?
Seeker's instruments ploughed for knowledge. Little did her pilots know she
would reap the Joke of the Gods.
When she collided with the crystalsphere, it bowed outward with her over a span
of lightminutes. Seeker had time for a frantic lasercast back to Earth. They only knew
that something strange was happening. Something had begun tearing them apart,
even as the fabric of space itself seemed to rend!
Then the crystalsphere shattered.
And where there had once been ten billion comets, now there were ten quadrillion.
Nobody ever found the wreckage of Seeker. Perhaps she had vaporized. Almost
half the human race died in the battle against the comets, and by the time the planets
were safe again, centuries later, Seeker was long gone.
We never did find out how, by what accident, she managed to crack the shell.
There are still those who contend that it was the crew's ignorance that crystalspheres
even existed that enabled them to achieve what had forever since seemed so
impossible.
Now the Shards illuminate the sky. Sol shines within a halo of light, reflected by
the ten quadrillion comets... the mark of the only goodstar accessible to man.
"We're coming in," Alice told me. I sat up in my seat and watched her nimble
hands dance across the panel. Then Pelenor drifted into view.
The great globe shone dully in the light from the Shards. Already the nimbus of
her drives caused space around her to shimmer.
The Sol-Gov tugs had finished loading the colonists abroad, and were departing.
The ten thousand corpsicles would require little tending during our mission, so we