"Coppel, Alfred - Goldenwing Cycle 01 - Glory UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Coppel Alfred)

member of Glory's fifth syndicate before he became the astroprogrammer for the syndicate captained by Duncan Kr. Han Soo was eighty, shiptime, when he died of a stroke. He was born on Earth, in a land called China, eighteen hundred years ago.
Glory has sailed from Sol to Barnard's Star, to Proxima, then to Wolf, and now to the Luyten Stars. A round-robin voyage takes Glory five years uptime.
The tachyon winds are constant. As once her clipper ship precursors were driven by the trades across the oceans of Earth, Glory is driven by the great Coriolis force of the epochal spin of the Milky Way galaxy.
With starlight reflecting from her great wings, Glory traverses the Luyten Oort Cloud—the Luyten solar system's vast englobature of frozen rock and ice far beyond the orbit of Luyten 726/9, the gas giant Drache.
Glory tacks and points to intercept Planet Voerster, fourth from the Luyten sun.
Starmen, it is said, are made, not born. Physically, this is certainly true. Each has undergone neuropsychosurgery and a socket implant. And each began life as a down-worlder. Almost without exception Starmen are recruited as children by other Starmen on Search downside. There are women Starmen, but they are few. Fertile females are not surrendered willingly by colonial societies with empty worlds to populate.
Aboard Glory in this syndicate period there is a single woman. Anya Amaya—her name, in the language of New Earth, where she was born—is pronounced with a kind of musical elision. She is native to the tenth planet of Proxima Centauri where women must breed at thirteen. When Glory appeared over New Earth Anya had reached the age of fifteen and had not yet borne a child. Considered useless by her femina-group, she was—in the manner of New Earth— offered for sale.
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It was her blind good fortune that Glory's computer detected a talent; Duncan's syndicate bought her the moment she was put on the market. She has now been in space, Wired, for four uptime years. On New Earth nineteen years have passed and Anya is forgotten. The cold women of New Earth do not bestow godhood on Goldenwing crews. They are far too sophisticated for that.
Starship syndicates are pure meritocracies. On Glory, once her neurosurgery and implant healed, Duncan and Glory's computer have made Anya Sailing Master.
At this moment Anya lies nude in her pod on the bridge. Her body twitches and quivers like a sleeping cat's. Through the thick cable connecting the computer to the socket in the back of Anya's skull, she and Glory are exchanging billions of bits each second. As Sailing Master she is overseeing the work of the monkeys, the set of the sails, the process of sloughing off speed, the availability of the crew, the distance of protocomets, the gravitational effects of distant bodies.
At this vast distance from the Luyten star, and so lightly tasked, Anya has time for personal concerns.
She has been humoring the old astronomer on Voerster. His name is Osbertus Kloster, and he is related to the ruling family of Voerster. Anya has been in communication with him for weeks. By burst code alone. Relative time-scales must be matched before voice communication is possible.
But Osbertus has used his primitive radio dishes to send excited greetings and information about the astronomy of the Luyten 726 system. His greatest accomplishment as a scientist has been a plot of the six gas giants of the outer Luyten solar system. He has carefully and in great detail informed Anya of the known facts about Erde, Smuts, deKlerk, Wallenberg, Thor and Drache. It is his contribution to a great event: the arrival at Voerster of a Goldenwing.
Using Glory's computer, Anya Amaya has had the astro-
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nomy of the Luyten solar system plotted for weeks. But ever tactful, the girl has pretended that Osbertus Kloster has provided Glory with vital information.
Now she is giving gentle orders to the monkeys who are swiftly reefing and backing the sails so that Glory may begin to bleed off excessive delta-V. Once done, Glory will slingshot around the outermost giant—Drache—and overtake Voerster, arriving exactly two twenty-nine hour days before Voerster's apastron, when the season of storms ends on Voerster's stratospheric highlands.
Anya Amaya joyously uses the astronomical assets available to her to achieve an elegant solution to a problem in celestial mechanics. This ability is the talent Glory'* computer discovered. It is the reason that Anya Amaya is Sailing Master. All Starmen are talented. It is a requirement of their craft. Anya Amaya and her captain, Duncan Kr, are more talented than most.
G/ory's cold-sleep combs were empty. They had been empty since the last colonists awoke on Aldrin, long ago. The only human thing in the combs was the dead astropro-grammer in hold 1009.
A strange man, Han Soo, with a horror of drifting in interstellar space for eternity. Duncan had promised him a burial in soil. If not the soil of China on Earth, then what soil the colonists of Voerster would allow a man of Old Earth.
The Goldenwings suffered from an ancient malady. They were no longer "economically viable enterprises." Without colonists to transport, what could a ship carry that might be ordered by one generation and delivered to another? This vulnerability to market forces was slowly forcing Goldenwings into dismantlement and oblivion. Circling Columbia, the colony world of the 61 Cygni system, the Goldenwing Starbolt slumbered away eternity as a space museum, visited by the precocious children of a technologically advanced society. On Wheat, the prairie world of Beta Indi, the bones
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of Goldenwing Potemkin lay like fossils surrounded by fifty million hectares of grain. But Glory sailed on.
She carried timeless things. In her holds were ingots of rare elements, old books and works of art, bolts of silk and tapestries, gemstones from Barnard's Star, and polished slates from Lalande. There were a few technological supplies now far out of date at home, but still useful to colonists on less favored worlds.
Glory was certain of a welcome on Voerster. She carried frozen animal embryos for the kraals and farms of Voerster's savannahs. There were horses, beef cattle, goats, sheep, and dogs. On Voerster's single continent there were only the few animals descended from the stock brought by the First Landers. Offworld stock had not prospered on Planet Voerster. And there was a sea of wild grass. But there were no trees, no insects, no flowers, and no native mammals. The indigenous life-forms were necrogenes struggling, against their nature, to survive.
A Voertrekker of Voerster could do without native flowers and insects. He could live without trees. But he could not survive without a replenishment of his stock of Terrestrial farm and domestic animals.
A great many of Voerster's five-hundred-day years before, an ancestor of the present Voertrekker-Praesident had ordered a vast shipment of genetically engineered animals from the captain of a Goldenwing named Nostromo.
The old Voertrekker's descendant now awaited the arrival of the shipment. The volk of Voerster could always be counted on to be stolidly patient and to take the long view of things.
On Voerster, the long view was the only view. Thirteen hundred planetary years before this time, colonists from South Africa had been landed on the single great continent by the Goldenwing Milagro. The voertrekking whites had fled from the plague-ridden horror of Africa. Miraculously, they had persuaded several thousand blacks to join them in
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cold-sleep and colonization. "Look about you," they said to the kaffirs. "See what Africa has become. There is talk of democracy, but what is real is the repression, plague, tyranny, and death you see all about you. On Luyten we promise you opportunity."
For the first three hundred years the promises were kept and Voerster prospered. There were some who saw a threat in the assumption of that name, called it code for oppression to come. But the whites wished only to honor their tribal leader, they said, who had led them skyward.
The Great Kaffir Rebellion exploded 301 years after Landers' Day. It began as a riot and ended in a ten-year war between the races. Civilization was staggered, knowledge was lost. A population laboriously built up to number ten million whites, sixty million blacks and fifteen million persons of mixed blood was savagely reduced to one-twentieth of that number. Science, except for the technology of war, languished. The medical arts stagnated. What had been a burgeoning technological society reverted to rustication. And there it remained, slowly dying, a sad replica of the world of apartheid the first white colonists of Voerster had secretly longed for.
The crew of Gloria Coelis knew little of Voerster's history. The planet had not been visited since the brief call by Goldenwing Nepenthe more than fifty years before. But what Nepenthe might have discovered about Voerster, only Nepenthe's syndicate knew. Goldenwing syndicates dealt with one another through agents. Space is simply too vast for chance encounters.
Anya Amaya, her eyes open but unseeing, caused the mizzen foretops to be furled preparatory to tacking the ship out of the Oort Cloud. Her move, so neatly done that it took only a score of monkeys racing up the rigging and out onto the spars, was watched and admired by the Captain.
Duncan Kr was a man with a natural appreciation of
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elegance, and the Sailing Master's skill was worthy of her talent. Within a solar system Anya sailed Glory like a zero-gravity dancer.
Duncan's pod lay next to the Sailing Master's. There were others, one for each member of the crew, but at the moment they were empty. Like Anya, Duncan lay nude in the pod's glyceroid medium, hard-wired to the computer.
His globe of awareness was far larger than Anya Amaya's. Her responsibility was to sail Glory, who was yare. Sweet to sail, quick to the helm, swift and manageable. Duncan's talent and responsibility was larger. His computer-enhanced awareness englobed the entire vesse! and the millions of cubic kilometers of space around her. Duncan sensed the Luyten 726 solar system almost in its entirety. He felt the turbulence of the Oort Cloud, cluttered with hurtling rocks and clumps of ice. Duncan was aware of collisions, close passes, the surge of gravity tides and centripetal forces.
There were twelve planets circling Luyten out to a distance of 5.6 x 1012 kilometers. The outer six were gas giants. Of the inner six, only one was habitable. Voerster, fourth from the sun, was not an easy world. Space had not provided Man with any worlds as good as his own. Soon Duncan would begin to sense the life on Voerster, still a billion kilometers sunward.
Closer at hand, Duncan was aware of the subtle bioelectric spillages from the living things aboard Glory. He feit the faint, spectral plasmas formed by the frozen animal embryos in the hold—the feral, joyous, psychic auras of the ship's family of cats—the strongest from Mira, the young queen who has been given her own small remote interface with Glory's computer. A sardonic joke by Dietr Krieg, the German neurocybersurgeon.
Wired, Duncan shared the protothoughts of the simian-brained cyborgs who inhabited the rig. Duncan even detected the melancholy grace notes released by Han Soo's slowly dissolving synapses in the comb.
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Sentience, Duncan thought, was fragile. But final death in the cold of space can be a slow business.
As Master and Commander—the syndicates were always drawn to ancient ranks and titles—Duncan was aware of all Glory contained, including her crew.