"James Patrick Kelly - Undone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

bean thoughts
"Whereare you going?" said the ship.
 Mada floated through the door bubble of the command mod. She wrapped her toes around the perch outside to steady herself.
"Mada, wait! I needa mission, a course, some line of inquiry."
She launched down the companionway.
"I’maDependent Intelligence, Mada." Its speaker buzzed with self-righteousness. "I have the right to proper and timely guidance."
The ship flowed a veil across her trajectory; as she approached, it went taut. That wasDI thinking: the ship was sure that it could just bounce her back into its
world. Mada flicked her claws and slashed at it, shredding holes half a meter long.
"AndI have the right to bean individual," she said. "Leaveme alone."
She caught another perch and pivoted off it toward the greenhouse blister. She grabbed the perch by the door bubble and paused to flow new aveoli into her
lungs to make up for the oxygen-depleted, carbon-dioxide-enriched air mix in the greenhouse. The bubble shivered as she popped through it and she breathed
deeply. The smells of life helped ground her whenever operation of the ship overwhelmed her. It was always so needy and there was only one of her. It would have
been different if they had been designed to go out in teams. She would have had her sibling Thiras at her side; together they might have been strong enough to
withstand the Utopian’s panic…no! Mada shook him out of her head. Thiras was gone; they were all gone. There was no sense in looking for comfort, downwhen
or up. All she had was the moment, the tick of the relentless present, filled now with the moist, bittersweet breath of the dirt, the sticky savor of running sap, the
bloom of perfume on the flowers. As she drifted through the greenhouse, leaves brushed her skin like caresses. She settled at the potting bench, opened a bin and
picked out a single bean seed.
Madacupped it between her two hands and blew on it, letting her body’s warmth coax the seed out of dormancy. She tried to merge her mind with its blissful
unconsciousness. Cotyledons stirred and began to absorb nutrients from the endosperm.Abean cared nothing about proclaiming the Three Universal Rights: the
right of all independent sentients to remain individual, the right to manipulate their physical structures and the right to access the timelines. Mada slowed her
metabolism to the steady and deliberate rhythm of the bean — what Utopian could do that? They held that individuality bred chaos, that function alone must
determine form and that undoing the past was sacrilege. Being Utopians, they could hardly destroy Trueborn and its handful of colonies. Instead they had tried to
put the Rights under quarantine.
Mada stimulated the sweat glands in the palms of her hands. The moisture wicking across her skin called to the embryonic root in the bean seed. The tip
pushed against the seat coat. Mada’s sibling batch on Trueborn had pushed hard against the Utopian blockade, to bring the Rights to the rest of the galaxy. Only a
handful hadmade it to open space. The brain clans had hunted them down and brought most of them back in disgrace to Trueborn. But not Mada. No, not wily
Mada,Mada the fearless, Madawhose heart now beat but oncea minute.
Thebean embryo swelled and its root cracked the seed coat. It curled into her hand, branching and rebranching like the timelines. The roots tickled her. Mada
manipulated the chemistry of her sweat by forcing her sweat ducts to reabsorb most of the sodium and chlorine. She parted her hands slightly and raised them up to
the grow lights. The cotyledons emerged and chloroplasts oriented themselves to the light. Madawas thinking only bean thoughts as her cupped hands filled with
roots and the first true leaves unfolded. More leaves budded from the nodes of her stem, her petioles arched and twisted to the light, the light. It was only the light
—violet-blue and orange-red— that mattered, the incredible shower of photons that excited her chlorophyll, passing electrons down carrier molecules to form
adenosine diphosphate and nicotinamide adenine dinucleo...
"Mada," said the ship. "The order to leave you alone is now superceded by primary programming."
"What?"Theword caught in her throat like a bone.
"You entered the greenhouse forty days ago."
Without quite realizing what she was doing, Mada clenched her hands, crushing the young plant.
"Iam directed to keep you from harm, Mada," said the ship. "It’s time to eat."
She glanced down at the dead thing in her hands. "Yes, all right." She dropped it onto the potting bench. "I’ve got something to clean up first but I’ll be there
in a minute." She wiped the corner of her eye. "Meanwhile, calculate a course for home."


natural background
Not until the ship scanned the quarantine zone at the edge of the Trueborn system did Mada begin to worry. In her time the zone had swarmed with the battle
asteroids of the brain clans. Nowthe Utopians were gone. Of course, that was to be expected after all this time. But as the ship re-entered the home system, dumping
excess velocity into the empty dimensions, Mada felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in the command mod.
Trueborn orbited a spectral typeG3V star, which had been known to the discoverers as HR3538. Scans showed that the Green Sea had become a climax forest
of deciduous hardwood. Therewere indeed new mountains—knife edges slicing through evergreen sheets—that had upthrust some eighty kilometers off the Fire