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

Coast, leaving Port Henoch landlocked.Arain forest choked the plain where the city of Blair’s Landing had once sprawled.
The ship scanned life in abundance. The seas teemed and flocks of Trueborn’s flyers darkened the skies like storm clouds: kippies and bluewings and warblers
and migrating stilts. Animals had retaken all three continents, lowland and upland, marsh and tundra. Mada could see the dust kicked up by the herds of
herbivorous aram from low orbit. The forest echoed with the clatter of shindies and the shriek of blowhards. Big hunters like kar and divil padded across the plains.
Therewerenew species as well, mostly invertebrates but also anumber of lizards and something like a great, mossy rat that built mounds five meters tall.
Noneof the introduced species had survived: dogs or turkeys or llamas. The ship could find no cities, towns, buildings — not even ruins. There were neither
tubeways nor roads, only the occasional animal track. The ship looked across the entire electromagnetic spectrum and saw nothing but the natural background.
Therewas nobody home on Trueborn. And as far as they could tell, there never had been.
"Speculate," said Mada.
"I can’t," said the ship. "There isn’t enough data."
"There’s your data." Mada could hear the anger in her voice. "Trueborn, as it would have been hadwenever even existed."
"Two-tenths ofa spin is a long time, Mada."
She shook her head. "They ripped out the foundations, even picked up the dumps. There’s nothing, nothing of us left." Madawas gripping the command perch
so hard that the knuckles of her toes were white. "Hypothesis," she said, "the Utopians got tired of our troublemaking and wiped us out. Speculate. "
"Possible, but that’s contrary to their core beliefs." Most DIs had terrible imaginations. They couldn’t tell jokes, but then they couldn’t commit crimes, either.
"Hypothesis: they deported the entire population, scattered us to prison colonies. Speculate."
"Possible, but a logistical nightmare. The Utopians prize the elegant solution."
She swiped the image of her home planet off the screen, as if to erase its unnerving impossibility. "Hypothesis: there are no Utopians anymore because the
revolution succeeded. Speculate."
"Possible, but then where did everyone go?Andwhy did they return the planet to its pristine state?"
She snorted in disgust. "What if," she tapped a finger to her forehead, "maybe we don’t exist. What if we’ve skipped to another time line? One in which the
discovery of Trueborn never happened? Maybe there has been no Utopian Empire in this timeline, no Great Expansion, no Space Age, maybe no human
civilization at all."
"One does not just skip to another timeline at random." The ship sounded huffy at the suggestion. "I’ve monitored all our dimensional reinsertions quite
carefully, and I can assure you that all these events occurred in the timeline we currently occupy."
"You’re saying there’s no chance?"
"If you want to write a story, why bother asking my opinion?"
Mada’s laugh was brittle. "All right then.Weneed more data." For the first time since she had been stranded upwhen, she felt a tickle stir the dead weight she
was carrying inside her. "Let’s start with the nearest Utopian system."


chasing shadows
The HR683 system was abandoned and all signs of human habitation had been obliterated. Mada could not be certain that everything had been restored to its
pre-Expansion state because the ship’s database on Utopian resources was spotty. HR4523was similarly deserted. HR509, also known as Tau Ceti, was only 11.9
light years from earth and had been the first outpost of the Great Expansion. Its planetary system was also devoid of intelligent life and human artifacts – with one
striking exception.
NuevoLAwas spread along the shores of the Sterling Sea like a half-eaten picnic lunch. Something had bitten the roofs off its buildings and chewed its walls.
Metal skeletons rotted on its docks, transports were melting into brown and gold stains. Once-proud boulevards crumbled in the orange light; the only traffic was
windblown litter chasing shadows.
Madawas happy to survey the ruin from low orbit. Acloser inspection would have spooked her. "Was it war?"
"There may have been a war," said the ship, "but that’s not what caused this. I think it’s deliberate deconstruction." In extreme magnification, the screen
showed a concrete wall pockmarked with tiny holes, from which dust puffed intermittently. "The composition of that dust is limestone, sand, and aluminum
silicate. The buildings are crawling with nanobots and they’re eating the concrete."
"Howlong has this been going on?"
"Ata guess, a hundred years, but that could be off by an order of magnitude."
"Who did this?" said Mada."Why? Speculate."
"If this is the outcome ofawar, then it would seem that the victors wanted to obliterate all traces of the vanquished. But it doesn’t seem to have been fought
over resources. I suppose we could imagine some deep ideological antagonism between the two sides that led to this, but such an extreme of cultural
psychopathology seems unlikely."
"I hope you’re right." She shivered. "So they did it themselves, then? Maybe they were done with this place and wanted to leave it as they found it?"