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

1
Ship Coming In


A god stood in the sky high above the sunset horizon, his long white hair streaming
in the solar wind. Later, when the sky's color had shifted from green to black, the white
glow would reach almost to the zenith, its light outshining the Foamy Wake, the broad
band of the Galaxy. At least, it would if the squall-clouds scudding in off the land to the
east had cleared by then. Gregor Cairns turned his back on the C. M. Yonge's own foamy
wake, and looked past the masts and sheets at the sky ahead. The clouds were blacker and
closer than they'd been the last time he'd looked, a few minutes earlier. Two of the
lugger's five-man crew were already swinging the big sail around, preparing to tack into
the freshening wind.
Much as he'd have liked to help, he knew from experience that he'd only get in the
way. He turned his attention back to the tanks and nets in which the day's haul snapped,
slapped, or writhed. Trilobites and ostracoderms, mostly, with a silvery smattering of
teleostean fish, a slimy slither of sea-slugs, and crusty clusters of shelled molluscs and
calcichordates. To Gregor this kind of assemblage was beginning to look incongruous
and anachronistic; he grinned at the thought, reflecting that he now knew more about the
marine life of Earth's oceans than he did of the planet whose first human settlers had long
ago named Mingulay.
His wry smile was caught by his two colleagues, one of whom smiled back.
Elizabeth Harkness was a big-boned, strong-featured young woman, about his own age
and with a centimeter or two of advantage in height. Under a big leather hat her rough-cut
black hair was blown forward over her ruddy cheeks. Like Gregor, she wore a heavy
sweater, oilskins, rubber boots, and gauntlets. She squatted a couple of meters away on
the laden afterdeck, probing tangles of holdfast with a rusty old knife, expertly slinging
the separated molluscs, calcichordates, and float-wrack into their appropriate tanks.
"Come on," she said, "back to work."
"Aye," said Gregor, stooping to cautiously heave a ten-kilogram trilobite,
scrabbling and snapping, into a water-filled wooden trough. "The faster we get this lot
sorted, the more time for drinks back at the port."
"Yeah, so don't stick with the easy stuff." She flung some surplus mussels to the
seabats that screamed and wheeled around the boat.
"Huh." Gregor grunted and left the relatively rugged trilobites to fend for
themselves in the netting and creels while he pitched in to deal with the small shelly
fauna. The vessel rolled, slopping salt water from the troughs and tanks, and then
freshwater from the sky hissed onto the deck as they met the squall. He and Elizabeth
worked on through it, yelling and laughing as their sorting became less and less
discriminatory in their haste.
"As long as they don't eat each other..."
The third student on the boat squatted opposite the two humans, knees on a level
with his broad cheekbones, oblivious to the rain pelting his hairless head, and to the
rivulets that trickled down his neck then over the seamless collar of his dull gray
insulation-suit. The nictitating membranes of his large black eyes, and an occasional snort
from his small nostrils or spit from his thin-lipped, inch-wide mouth were the only
indications that the downpour affected him at all. His hands each had three long fingers
and one long thumb; each digit came equipped with a claw that made a knife, for this task