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

"We don't know," he agreed, "but one day we'll find out." He jerked his face
upward at the flare of white spreading up the sky. "Even the gods play, I'm sure of that.
Why else would they leave their... endless peace between the stars, and plunge between
our worlds and swing around the sun?"
Salasso's neck seemed to contract a little; he averted his eyes from the sky,
shivering again. Elizabeth laughed, not noticing or perhaps not reading the saur's subtle
body-language. "Gods above, you can talk, man!" she said. "You think we'll ever know?"
"Aye, I do," said Gregor. "That's our play."
"Speak for yourself, Cairns, I know what mine is after a long hard day, and I'm" --
she glanced over her shoulder -- "about ten minutes from starting it with a long hard
drink!"
Gregor shrugged and smiled, and they all relaxed, gazing at the sea and chatting.
Then, as the first houses of the harbor town slipped by, one of the crewmen startled them
with a loud, ringing cry:
"Ship coming in!"
Everybody on the boat looked up at the sky.
 James Cairns stood, huddled in a fur cloak, on the castle's ancient battlement and
gazed at the ship as it slid across the sky from the east, a glowing zeppelin at least three
hundred meters long. Down the dark miles of the long valley -- lighting the flanks of the
hill -- and over the clustered houses of the town it came, its course as steady and constant
as a monorail bus. As it passed almost directly overhead at a thousand meters, Cairns was
briefly amused to see that among the patterns picked out in lights on its sides were the
squiggly signature-scribble of Coca-Cola; the double-arched golden M; the brave
checkered banner of Microsoft; the Stars and Stripes; and the thirteen stars -- twelve
small yellow stars and one central red star on a blue field -- of the European Union.
He presumed the display was supposed to provide some kind of reassurance. What
it gave him -- and, he did not doubt, scores of other observers -- was a pang of pride and
longing so acute that the shining shape blurred for a second. The old man blinked and
sniffed, staring after the craft as its path sloped implacably seaward. When it was a
kilometer or so out to sea, and a hundred meters above the water, a succession of silver
lens-shaped objects scooted away from its sides, spinning clear and then heading back the
way the ship had come. They came sailing in toward the port as the long ship's hull
kissed the waves and settled, its flashing lights turning the black water to a rainbow
kaleidoscope. Other lights, underwater and much smaller but hardly less bright, joined it
in a colorful flurry.
Cairns turned his attention from the ship to its gravity skiffs; some swung down to
land on the docks below, most skittered overhead and floated down, rocking like falling
leaves, to the grassy ridge of the long hill that sloped down from the landward face of the
castle. James strolled to the other side of the roof to watch. Somewhere beneath his feet, a
relief generator hummed. Floodlights flared, lighting up the approach and glinting off the
steely sides of the skiffs.
Almost banally after such a bravura arrival, the dozen or so skiffs had extended and
come to rest on spindly telescoped legs; in their undersides hatches opened and
stairladders emerged, down which saurs and humans trooped as casually as passengers
off an airship. Each skiff gave forth two or three saurs, twice or thrice that number of
humans; about a hundred in all walked slowly up the slope and onto the smoother grass
of the castle lawns, tramping across it to be greeted by, and to mingle with, the castle's
occupants. The gray-suited saurs looked more spruce than the humans, most of whom
were in sea-boots and oilskins, dripping wet. The humans toward the rear were hauling
little wheeled carts behind them, laden with luggage.