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

momentary dizziness as she looked up at Mother. She took a deep breath.
The hiss of air was loud inside her helmet. On all sides around her the
shattered remnants of a world kept pace, most of them tumbling slowly.
She was in the middle of an eerie sea of motion made up of the glaring,
brutal, unfiltered sunlight reflecting off sunward planes and angles and
the absolute blackness of space that was echoed on the dark sides of the
asteroids. And over and under and to all sides were the cold, many-faceted
faces of the core star fields.

In the shadow of the ship the suit's coolers changed tone as their
function was reversed to heating. The light attached to her helmet came
on automatically. She pointed it by moving her head, approached the
extraction arm, stepped down into the trench. It was pleasing to her to see
the light bouncing off flecks of pure gold, but that pleasure passed when
she focused her attention on the thing that was partially exposed near the
biting end of the arm.

She placed the work kit on the barren stone, removed a hand-held, laser
powered cutter, a tool developed especially for mining. A sensor guided
her to a setting that would not harm the fossil bone. She applied the laser
to the matrix rock around the skull experimentally, saw that the setting
was perfect. The enclosing rock melted away.

For a few minutes she forgot her appalling isolation, did not lift her
eyes to see the harsh sunlight or the crowded stars, concentrated on the
job at hand until she could lift the skull free. She placed it on the rock at
the side of the trench and cleaned it with the laser beam.

She had not been wildly interested in the subject matter covered in the
one course in paleontology that had been required at the Academy.
Following the fossil record of the evolution of the Tigian tiger was, at best,
dull. Only a few days had been allocated to the discussion of the work
being done by technicians in anti-radiation gear on Old Earth, where the
hardened remains of the Old Ones, man himself, were being unearthed.
Before going extravehicular, she had punched in orders for the scant
material on the development of man. The skulls of the Old Ones,
Earthmen, were identical to those of modern man. This had inspired
various interpretations. One cynical school of thought had it that God had
given up on man, that after the Destruction He had determined that man
was His greatest failure and had abandoned any further development.
Others, more upbeat, believed that, as the Bible said, man had been
created in God's image, and was thus perfect, needing no evolution from
the form that had been developed prior to the Destruction.

The mutation of the Old Ones into Healers, Power Givers, Far Seers,
and Keepers after the Destruction was, depending on one's viewpoint: 1.
The power of God exemplified, since divine miracles were required to
preserve life on earth. 2. The work of the evil one, perverting the perfection
of God's finest creation into ugly and malignant forms.
 Fortunately, the first view, or more moderate adaptations of it,