"Richard A. Lupoff - After the Dreamtime" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lupoff Richard A)

We can—but who would travel with the meat, who had ever sailed the
night between the stars?

You have never done it and never shall. You cannot know one minnow's
worth of the experience. You have seen representations, re-creations, of
membrane ships, but they are feeble attempts to communicate the
experience.

Start with a rod of collapsed matter, matter incredibly dense yet drawn
so thin that it cannot exercise the usual property of its kind, of capturing
all matter nearby and even all radiation, and crushing them to itself. The
rod that lies at the heart of each membrane ship is so thin that it is barely
visible—beside it a pencil lead is an incredibly fat cylinder, even a fine
electronic wire is a gross and clumsy thing. A rod of collapsed matter
drawn so thin that it is virtually invisible—straight as a plumb line and
two hundred meters long.

At each end a matter converter, a small device using the agonized
matter principle to convert a tiny chunk of the rod into pure energy,
enough energy to start a membrane ship on her way from port-orbit upon
her interstellar journey, or at the end of that journey to brake her from
interstellar speed and permit her to achieve port-orbit and unload.

Around that rod, place a structure of flat decking material, arbitrary in
width, a hundred eighty meters in length, making a triangle in cross
section, and around it a cylinder of this radiation shielding running the
length of the ship. That makes the passenger tank: three gigantic rooms,
flat of floor, their floors mounted at three-hundred degree angles to one
another, sharing a common, curving roof.

There the meat stays during a voyage. They can come onto the deck to
inspect cargo if they wish—some shippers insist on riding with their cargo
and inspecting it periodically throughout a voyage—but what good is that?
Clad in huge and cumbersome spacesuits like the repair crews of ordinary
ships, they peer at us sailors in amazement and envy—we return their
stares, our faces showing our pity and contempt—and then they crawl
clumsily back through the airlocks into their tank.

When I am grayed-out—if I am grayed-out, I should say, for I am not in
the least certain that I will live that long, that I will choose to live that
long— when I am grayed-out I will ration out my last melanin carefully,
making certain that I can sail back to Yurakosi as a man, not as a piece of
meat. I will debark at Port Bralku, I will turn, still wearing sailor's garb,
and wave farewell to the Kunapi and the Aranda aboard whatever
membrane ship I have sailed. I will board a little shuttle craft and return
to the surface of Yurakosi, and I will find myself a little house, perhaps at
Snake Bay or Blue Mud Bay, and I will build myself a sailing canoe, and I
will be a water sailor when I can no longer be a space sailor.

Never will I travel as meat.