"Zach Hughes - Mother Lode" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

experts agreed that the message carved into the bones of a continent was
a warning: "Look at this world and tremble. Build not, for we will return."

Erin turned off the optics, shivered. Then, perversely, as if to prove to
the vast emptiness around her that she wasn't really spooked by the
mystery of twenty dead worlds, she checked the library index and watched
a docu-history that told of the initial discovery of the worlds in the sac,
and ended with the account of the last licensed scientific expedition to the
sac by six graduate students aboard the Paulus, under Laconius of Tigian.
The Paulus had disappeared, had vanished as completely as the race that
had lived on the Dead Worlds. Every holo-drama fan could name the six
students who had disappeared with Paulus.

Of course, ships did evaporate into the nothingness of space from time
to time, but the fact that the Paulus had disappeared while on a trip to
the Dead Worlds had inspired writers, good and bad, to go into spasms of
speculative creativity.

Aside from the Dead Worlds docu-history, the Mother's library
contained no less than three holo-dramas based on the loss of the Paulus.
Erin watched two of them while waiting for the generator to charge and
then, before the big power source was fully ready, she blinked onward and
past the sac into the star fields and to the end of the line, as far as
established blink beacons were concerned. From there on she had only the
star chart in Mother's computer, a chart compiled by her father's old
shipmate who, she felt, may or may not have known a black hole from his
own dusky posterior orifice.

She wanted a fully charged generator. She watched the third
holo-drama about the Dead Worlds in which a rather sick minded writer
presented the theory that giant lava beetles had hatched deep down in the
fiery magma of the interior of the planets and had eaten the life from
within before, in desperate hunger, they had emerged to crumble into
tiny, unidentifiable bits everything they didn't eat.

To get the taste of that one out of her mind, she selected the
documentary version of the X&A expedition to the colliding galaxies in
Cygnus and the finding of the Miaree manuscripts written in the language
of the second alien race, the Artonuee, of which U.P. explorers had found
evidence.

She told herself that she'd had enough thinking about aliens, about
planet killers and the Cygnus races who joined each other in death. She
had spent her time of awe and wonder as an undergraduate, speculating
with others on the nature of the female ruled Artonuee and the very
masculine Delanians, and about the nature and the source of power for
those who had devastated the Dead Worlds.

But back in college on New Earth she'd been a long way from either the
colliding galaxies in Cygnus or from the twenty worlds in the sac. Out