"Ken MacLeod - Engines of Light 1 - Cosmonaut Keep" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

COSMONAUT KEEP
by KEN MACLEOD (2000)



[VERSION 2.1 (Mar 04 04). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update
the version number by 0.1 and redistribute.]



and one of the chiefe trees or posts at the right side of the entrance had the barke
taken off, and 5 foote from the ground in fayre Capitall letters was graven CROATOAN
without any crosse or signe of distresse



0
Prologue


You're not here. Try to remember this. Try not to remember where you really are.
You are in a twisty maze of dark corridors, all alike. You slide down the last of
them as smoothly as a piston in a syringe, and are then ejected into the suddenly
overwhelming open space of the interior. Minutes ago, you saw outer space, the universe,
and the whole shebang itself didn't look bigger than this. Outer space is, fundamentally,
familiar. It's only the night sky, without the earth beneath your feet.
This place is fundamentally unfamiliar. It's twenty miles long and five high and it's
bigger than anything you've ever seen. It's a room with a world inside it.
To them, it's a bright world. To us it's a dark, cold cavern. To them, our most
delicate probes would be like some gigantic spaceship hovering on rocket jets over one of
our cities, playing searchlights of intolerable brightness across everything. That's why
we're seeing it through their eyes, with their instruments, in their colors. The translation
of the colors has more to do with emotional tone than the electromagnetic spectrum; a lot
of thought, ours and theirs, has gone into this interpretation.
So what you see is a warm, rich green background, speckled with countless tiny,
lively shapes in far more colors than you have names for. You think of jewels and
hummingbirds and tropical fish. In fact the comparison with rainforest or coral reef is
close to the mark. This is an ecosystem more complex than that of the whole Earth. As
the viewpoint drifts closer to the surface you recall pictures of cities from the air, or the
patterns of silicon circuitry. This, too, is apt: here, the distinction between natural and
artificial is meaningless.
The viewpoint zooms in and out: from fractal snowflakes, rainbow-hued, in
kaleidoscopic motion, to the vast violet-hazed distances and perspectives of the habitat,
making clear the multiplicity and diversity of the place, the absence of repetition.
Everything here is unique; there are similarities, but no species.
You can't shut it off; silently, relentlessly, the viewpoint keeps showing you more
and more, until the inhuman but irresistible beauty of the alien garden or city or machine
or mind harrows your heart. It will not let you go, unless you bless it; then, just as you
fall into helpless love with it, it expels you, returning you to your humanity, and the dark.