"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 1 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

"This one, though, we can't go down on. Nobody can, or could, at least that we know of. We can't even say exactly what's in it, although you'll have full spectrographic data that'll say it's more ordinary than it really is. It is an anomaly, a kind of object that doesn't fit current knowledge or theory, and it's driving scientists and master computers as crazy as it has the teams who've tried to crack it. It doesn't even have a name. For reasons that will be quickly obvious, the franchisees have accepted the scout's descriptive name and simply called it the Hot Plant."
The room darkened, and suddenly there it was -- far away at first, then closer, until it nearly filled the wall.
"That's no planet," Jimmy McCray commented. "That's a star!"
And, indeed, that was exactly what it looked like -- a common yellow sun.
"That is the impression," Trannon Kose agreed, "but if it is a star, it is not any sort of sun we know. First, although its color is roughly that of the common G-type sun, its mass is infinitely greater, and its size is smaller than the common white dwarf. In fact, the density clearly shows that the damned thing should either collapse into a black hole or blow up, and it certainly should not be as relatively cool as it is nor that color. Attempts to penetrate its core or to read the core composition have failed. Either the probes are destroyed or they send back meaningless garbage. We don't know if that is because the core is something totally new or because its other activities scramble any attempts to get meaningful data. You see, it has the annoying habit of occasionally and randomly spewing out all sorts of crap. It threw something at the last team there, which blew all the instrument readings off the scale and took the team along in a wild ride at nearly the speed of light. It was as if it were possible to bunch together gravitons and spew them out in a mini, terribly dense, little planet. They barely escaped with their lives and won't go back."
That caused a stir.
"There really is no safe place to monitor this thing from, but activity is so random and so unpredictable that the odds are at least as good that nothing will come at us as that everything will come at us."
"That comforts me greatly," the Durquist remarked wryly.
Trannon-Kose ignored the interruption. "Normally, this would be a matter of sheer science, not involving folks like us, except for the most incredible and inexplicable fact of all.
"It is inhabited."
That caused a real stir. "Hold on, hold on!" McCray called out. "How the bloody hell can you tell!"
"That is where you come in, McCray," Tran responded. "With amplifiers you will have no problem verifying that for yourself, nor Modra either. There is definitely something, a lot of things, alive on that hell, something that thinks, and that makes it the key to the whole puzzle. Just suspend your skepticism for a moment and accept what I say."
"That is not easy to do," Tris Lankur said flatly.
"It is things like this that make civilization worth saving," the Durquist noted, and nobody was sure if it was being facetious or not.
"All right, just do it for the sake of argument. Imagine any kind of life that could have evolved down there. Things must change constantly. Their environment, their very composition and makeup, is unlike any kind of life as we know it, and their existence must be so alien it would have little or nothing in common with any of us. They certainly don't see or hear or do anything else in the ways we do, but logic dictates that they probably are unaware that there is even an environment outside of their own. They live on the place, not in the outer layers, so there's no probability of awareness. The mass at the core is enormous; they would have no way, short of getting blown by one of those instabilities, to escape from it, and if they did, they would surely die -- and do. We've monitored their deaths."
"You mean -- telepathically," Jimmy McCray commented.
The oval head bobbed in the equivalent of a nod. "Yes, telepathically and empathically. We think their entire communications level is on the mental bands. It's possible, even probable, that they are some form of bonded energy creature, that they are, in fact, effectively disembodied minds. Don't ask me how that's possible. Some of the top scientists in the field are now under the care of the best psychs in the Exchange after looking into that question, and the number of careers in physics alone that this thing has already ruined are beyond all but the greatest computer's ability to count. Fortunately, our job isn't figuring that out. What we're expected to do is figure out some way to make contact with these -- people -- or whatever they are."
"The first step is simple awareness," Jimmy McCray pointed out. "If they get contacted -- even if they can't understand any of the framework -- so that they are aware of another and alien intelligence, then that's the wedge. I can't see why that's so hard."
"Everybody agrees with you, McCray. The trouble is, they can't handle it. We can read them, but any attempt to contact them -- well, so far, at least as far as we can tell, kills them. The prevailing theory is that, being pure energy, when they make telepathic contact they immediately link minds. When they do, they are suddenly faced with an environment so alien, so cold, so totally unlike anything they could even imagine, their brain or whatever passes for it interprets our normal cozy environment as death -- and they promptly die."
"That problem is not unheard of," the Durquist noted, "but in all other cases we've been able to get down there in some kind of suits or protective devices and announce ourselves in their element, providing some kind of grounding for them. If the Hot Plant even destroys our instruments and probes -- that is out of the question. I can see the problem."
"And the potential reward if it's solved," Modra Stryke put in. "Imagine that kind of environment, that sort of new life form, down there, in that kind of hell. If we could somehow contact them, link up with them in some way, that kind of power and exclusive knowledge of a whole new branch of physics would have a value beyond calculation and would pay off for generations."
"Is this the first job your husband's firm handed us, Modra?" Tris Lankur asked a bit peevishly.
"They bought into the franchise on a minority basis, yes," she responded. "They're running out of seed money, after all, and if they don't have a team in on the problem, they could forfeit the rights. At least it's not a smelly swamp on a dirt ball, and while we've killed a few of them, by accident, they haven't done anything back. If they reacted, they'd have to know we were there, and that would be half the battle."
"What about it, McCray?" Trannon Kose asked the new member. "This will to a large extent depend on you, although with our help, advice, and support. You want a crack at it?"
He shrugged. "I don't see what we have to lose. The worst I can do is kill a few hundred more of the hot little devils."
Jimmy McCray sat back in his chair on the crew bridge of the Widowmaker and stared at the screen showing the target. The Hot Plant was aptly named; a small but incredibly fiery little bugger about the size of the average gas giant and blazing away like a miniature sun, the filters showing the whirls and eddies of its gases in constant turmoil.
In a sense, it was a sun, but, unlike a true sun, it wasn't master of all it surveyed. Instead, this blazing orb was in orbit, along with an incredible amount of junk, around a terribly small but incredibly dense core that wasn't even visible except with instruments. It could be a neutron star or some other object in the process of compacting down to the point where it became a black hole, except for its irritating habit of intermittently spinning off tiny pieces of itself and Singing them out in all directions. It was that sort of behavior that had destroyed several previous ships and which was why, now, there was an Exploiter learn in place instead of the usual raft of scientists. All the monitoring was being done by robot craft that had, according to Tris, a useful life span of perhaps two or three months before they didn't jump fast enough.
He stared at the inferno on the screen and for the thousandth time tried, and failed, to imagine any sort of life, no matter how bizarre, existing on it.
The core wobbled like mad from the parental bombardment; it had a starlike temperature and climate, and it was as good a definition of Hell as he'd ever seen.
Widowmaker was as close in as they dared, although the computer pilot was primed and ready and the engines were at minimum power in case anything really nasty came by that might require a quick exit. That, of course, presupposed that the dark little bastard at the center of this cockeyed solar system sent something their instruments were designed to measure, and sent it at a slow enough pace so they could dodge it.
Placement was tricky here. They'd all have preferred to be much farther away, but then, even with the amplifiers, there would be no way he could get a reading on anything on that fireball out there, and the time lag alone would have been irritating. Too close, and even the shields wouldn't keep them from frying, or being spun about in all sorts of force whips from the conflicting close-in bodies.
He still didn't like to be around Tris Lankur, and he trusted the cymol even less, but being around Modra wasn't exactly a clutch of jollies, either. He couldn't remember anybody that miserable or that guilt-ridden who hadn't done away with themselves by now. If being there was uncomfortable for him, it was sheer torture for her; she was eating her bloody insides out, and not deep down, but right on the primary band, where it washed over him if he didn't take constant steps to shut out those thoughts. Trannon Kose was a bit easier to take, although his human conversational style concealed an interior thought pattern and frame of reference that occasionally made McCray dizzy.
Molly spent most of her time relaxing in the cabin, listening to godawful music played by who-knew-what on what could only remotely be described as some kind of sound-making machines,
but at least she knew enough to keep out of the way. She had the uncanny ability to simply turn her mind off, something he often envied -- and would certainly wish on Modra Stryke.
She hadn't quite gotten the idea of how all this had come about or why, but she had remarked that Modra was "all hollow, real, real sad," and that Kose was "mad at the girl for some reason' 'n not hidin' it well," while the Durquist "seem to think all us is a neat show." He wasn't sure what that last meant, not being able to penetrate the Durquist's blocking pattern, but he had the uneasy feeling that Molly meant exactly what she said.
Grysta remarked.
"Huh? How'd you know I was thinking that?"
< We been sort of close, you know. You don't need to be a telepath to figure out some things; you just need brains. >
"Intellect without compassion is just a good computer," he retorted sourly.
< Yeah? And what did compassion get you but saddled with somebody half-horse and half-bimbo? Or buried alive if I hadn't stopped you. >
"Maybe -- maybe like the woman Stryke, I'm just trying to justify still being alive."
< You 'II live a long time. Jimmy. Deep down you don't have the guts to do what Lankur did and you know it. Your only hope is that somebody or something will do it for you. >
He sighed and looked at the chair. "I guess we better get to work. I'll have to experience this to believe that there could be anything remotely alive, let alone sentient, in that mess."
The usual crew chairs were on the crew bridge, of course, but there was one extra, before the big screen, particularly large and padded and comfortable-looking. It had odd straps and small handles for handholds, too, and a small control panel under a false armrest on the right side.
Jimmy sat in it, reclined to a comfortable position, then activated the controls by his right hand. Instantly a nearly invisible energy blister surrounded the chair, uniting him with the ship's communications system and putting most of it under his control while simultaneously shutting out everything else, from the usual ship's noises to the sound of his own breathing to any stray thoughts of others. Isolated, cocoonlike, he could first tune out Grysta, now that there was nothing else to eliminate, and then open his mind via the com link pointed at the sunlike world beyond.
He felt the shock that the first telepaths must have felt when they explored this sector; disbelief, amazement, and a large measure of self-doubt that he was getting what he seemed to be getting.
The blazing inferno slipped away; what remained was impossibly alive, in the way that real worlds populated by real people were alive! Good God! The massive, seething babble that swept over him was incredibly powerful.
A telepathic race, he thought. Of course. They would have to be.
But a race of what? What kind of demonic things could live in Hell and be comfortable?
With a combination of thought control and instrument manipulation he began to zero in, selectively edit out, localize. It was as if you first saw a world, then narrowed to a continent, then to a region, then to a specific city or town in that region, and finally to a particular point in that city.