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

"I would not presume to guess. It has been there quite a while, though. It is definitely buried in rock and soil to a fair depth, and there is no sign of construction or melting or other alterations. A good bet is that it has been there a very long time, and that the rock and soil have formed around it. It has not, however, been overgrown by the surrounding vegetation or covered by volcanic ash or debris. This indicates that there is some kind of maintenance function within it that still works. Again, if one had to speculate, it would appear most likely that the thing contains a system somewhat analogous to my position in this ship. It is entirely possible that the whole structure is some sort of artificial intelligence in a shell, and indeed that may be all that it is."
"Entirely plausible. You are certain, though, that it is of extraplanetary origin and not merely an unusual feature?"
"Positive. The energy pulses show a clear-cut power source of some kind, and there is some intake and exhaust of gases.
Not a sufficient amount to indicate that the whole structure has full atmosphere, but enough to suggest that at least a small pan of it has. It would be interesting to get close enough to analyze the gases it expels."
"Then let's get close enough. Roll in a remote unit and let's see just what it's made of and what its reactions might be to an approach. How long will it take?"
"I have already constructed and programmed such a unit, anticipating your actions. However, it is now past dark down mere in its area, and I would suggest a daytime foray. Get some food and rest. In the morning we shall test this thing's mettle."
The probe dropped fairly close to the object, in part to see if that would provoke any reaction from it. No scans or other transmissions were detected, and the probe settled to its point just slightly off the ground and proceeded slowly toward the artifact as Cymak and his monitoring computer watched on the screens above.
From ground level, the long, exposed end, which sometimes looked like the rough end of a crystal shard and sometimes like a depression, looked very much the latter, almost a tunnel ringed by sixteen even facets of crystalline substance leading back to a single black point that might or might not have been an entrance of some kind.
The probe did not at first try an approach to that point, but instead rose up and did as much of a survey of the exterior as it could. The initial measurements held up; it was a hair over forty meters in length, seemingly embedded or wedded to the bedrock, the exposed portion a bit under four meters high from ground level. There were no observable or measurable openings, but it did seem to "bleed" gases in the broken, or entry, end, almost as if it were somehow selectively porous. The region of atmospheric bleed or exchange went in a bit over six meters and then stopped abruptly.
"Definitely some sort of atmospheric chamber," the ship told him. "It might be the entire inhabitable life zone within the object, or it might be the only one that requires it. At the far end are two isolated spots giving off heat -- not a lot, but definitely indicating a coolant mechanism -- and that's it."
"See if you can take a sample and analyze it," Cymak suggested, more fascinated than worried.
The probe settled down on top of the structure, anchored itself on three tight suction feet, then extended a small-core drill and attempted to take a small sample. It didn't happen. All the drill did was whirl around and begin to melt in the frustration of going against something harder than its bit, even though the bit was made of the hardest substance known to the Xymanth.
"Whatever it is, it's not quartz," the computer commented.
"Obviously. Well, it's almost certainly an exercise in futility, but run through all the tests and see if we can come up with anything."
Burning, controlled blasting, laser, and other tests proved equally futile, proving Cymak correct. The computer spent four hours doing everything it could to the object and at the end of that time they knew just as much as they had before they began.
"One thing is certain -- if we could figure out its composition and duplicate it, we'd have the perfect enclosure and building material," Cymak said, "Something built with this stuff would be the first construction that really would last down through the ages."
"I am not at all certain it is the material," the ship responded. "I just took another series of measurements and they differ slightly from our earlier ones. Not in gross proportions -- we are talking slight changes here -- but definitely different. In fact, I have now completed a third pass and it is different still, yet the surface is not moving at all. It is very much as if the object is indeed changing its shape slightly and almost constantly, yet I can not directly measure such a change in progress. It is almost as if the thing were not -- quite -- totally in our universe. As if our physical laws don't quite apply to it."
The Xymanth was surprised. "You mean -- another universe? That it has somehow poked into our universe without quite losing contact with its own?"
"In layman's terms, that is about it. If it were not quite in phase with us, either temporally or in some other dimensional level, that would explain why it seems impervious to all that we have tried to do to it."
"Is that possible?"
"I have never heard of such a thing, but at a guess, faced with reality, I can find no other theory that might explain all its properties. We know very little of the geometry of parallel universes. We exceed the speed of light and travel as far as we do because we know some of the properties and topology of one, but here we may be touching a different one. That theory explains much,
if true, although I have never heard of such an intersection actually being discovered. It would certainly explain the properties and characteristics of this object, as well as how it got here. Whoever or whatever built this thing did not fly it here, they simply moved it to a parallel intersection point and shoved it through. To what purpose, however, I cannot speculate."
The Xymanth thought about that for a moment. "I might hazard a guess. What is our logical next move?"
"Why, to try to gain entry, of course."
"Yes. I am reminded of the mothryx traps of my own people. Weblike constructs that one lays upon the ground, partly concealed, with a one-way entrance. The mothryx comes along, crawls in the entry, and is trapped there. The trapper then comes along later and the meal is locked inside, fresh and preserved. A random probe from a curious race able to do this on a far larger and more sophisticated scale might serve the same purpose. It is simply here, attracting attention by virtue of its being unlike anything else, waiting for the unwary or the overly curious to crawl inside."
"A fascinating theory. Shall we test it?"
"By alt means."
"It might be fruitless no matter what. If the thing is out of sync with our space-time matrix, then transmissions from within it may be impossible."
The Xymanth had thought of that. "If so, it will be most disappointing, but then we will transmit what we have and leave it to the military and the Exploiter Teams to deal with. Proceed."
The probe moved forward again, then down, facing now that forward region that looked like quartz shards from above, but like a gaping mouth from level ground. The ship re-angled a repeater so that signals broadcast horizontally from the probe might be caught and retransmitted upwards, then sent the probe carefully on its way toward the black spot at the center of the shard walls.
"My sophisticated measuring devices are going mad," the ship reported, "but the basics are holding. Atmospheric pressure constant, temperature rising but slightly, visual breaking up on direct but holding well with the repeater. Distance, however, is skewed. According to my readout we have already-traversed the length of the object and yet we are just now approaching the entrance."
"It would be a pretty elaborate joke if it took us in and immediately expelled us out the other end," Cymak commented. "A single door."
On the screens that "door" now loomed wide, its edges regular, but the blackness was not a hole into the interior but rather a tough-looking membrane. The probe stopped perhaps centimeters from the surface and extended a small silvery handlike probe to first push against the seal and then to use its three "fingers" to attempt to sample the material. It did not get the chance to do the latter, for at its touch the membrane seemed to rotate counterclockwise and fall back.
"An iris," the ship noted. "At least we are welcomed in."
"Yes," agreed the scout, "but welcomed in to where? Can that be the interior of the thing? It is huge."
"As I surmised, the object is not fully within our continuum," the ship commented with some satisfaction. "The constancy of our signal transmission is the only bridge we now have to wherever the probe actually is. I cannot get accurate measurements; the figures shift wildly now, far greater than the exterior measurements, yet I believe my instruments are actually functioning. They were simply never designed to measure something this alien to our experience."
It was a great chamber made of the same quartzlike material as the exterior, but it was irregular, with gre^t columns of crystal rising from floor to ceiling like majestic towers, each illuminated with a cold inner light that was crimson in some, golden in others, and blue and green and colors without names that Cymak could speak. The overall effect was quite beautiful.
The floor was uneven, almost a miniature rolling terrain, the ceiling no more regular than the floor, and the walls seemed to curve this way and that, all catching the light from the columns and blending, twisting, and distorting it into rainbows of color that were not still but slowly writhing back and forth, in and out.
"It is not the light sources that are pulsing or changing," the ship noted. "Rather the walls, floor, ceiling, even the columns are subtly shifting in size and shape as we go through. I believe that to be an illusion produced by our inability to see and measure such conditions accurately. This geometry has been heretofore theoretical in nature. My best guess is that my initial theory was wrong; this thing does not exist outside of our continuum but rather in a multitude of continua simultaneously, ours included. I think it is a tesseract of some son, although how one would build such a thing and make it real and accessible is beyond any knowledge our world possesses."
"Far more interesting than how is why someone would build it," Cymak commented, fascinated. "And, for that matter, who."
"There are inner chambers. I am having problems with transmissions now on a level and scale for which I might not be able to compensate for very long. Still, we will explore so long as we have some sort of control and line to the probe. I fear, though, that if transmission is cut for any time, even a few nanoseconds, we might lose any chance of recall. We will try the nearest central chamber and see what we might see." The probe went forward, the images becoming jerky on the screen, more like a succession of still frames than a moving picture, as it crossed into the new chamber.
"Less illumination here," the ship reported. "I think I ..."
Conversation stopped. Cymak felt his breathing stop too as the contents of the smaller center chamber suddenly came into sharp focus.
It was a dark room, with but two great pillars in the center. Both were illuminated fully by inner yellow light, but this time they were not at all transparent. Suspended within the columns like insects in amber were -- things.
Cymak had never been religious. His people had too many gods, like most races, none of whom had done anything particularly for those who invoked them or asked their blessings, but in whose name a lot of wrongs were often committed. Now, however, he was beginning to reevaluate those opinions.
The Empire controlled thousands of worlds upon which hundreds of races had settled, born before and after they had been absorbed into the Empire. The races were of every conceivable shape and form and type; they breathed water and methane and lots of other junk as well, and some were so alien from the rest that they were barely comprehensible to outsiders. And yet, somehow, all had developed at one time in their past theologies and cosmologies, many as different as night and day and even more incomprehensible, but with a curious single commonalty among them that had fascinated and puzzled anthropologists from the start.
The pair in the columns were that commonalty in the flesh.
Each stood perhaps two and a half meters high. Their feet were great cloven hoofs; their legs, slightly bowed, were covered with thick purplish hair to the midriff, while their chests were bare, dark and hard-looking, almost like bone rather than skin. The arms came down from great, broad shoulders and seemed much too long, furred like the legs, but terminating in great clawed hands. The faces were skeletal masks, grinning horrors with broad, clownish mouths, snoutlike nostrils, and large, dark eyes that seemed almost as black as space, set off by thick purple brows angled down toward the bridge of the nose forming a connected, thick V shape. From their heads grew ugly, misshapen horns.
Their descriptions varied slightly from race to race and even from culture to culture within a race, yet none would have had any more difficulty than Cymak in instantly recognizing them for what they were.
"By the gods of my ancestors," he breathed. "Demons!"