"Ian McDonald - Verthandi's Ring" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

innermost level, the heart of the heart, a sphere of quantum nano-processors ten
kilometers in diameter, such a search was far-reaching—the equivalent of every
virtual mouse hole and house shrine—and instanta-neous. And blank. The two
remaining crew members of Ever-Fragrant Per-fume of Divinity understood too
well what that meant. “We’re going to have to do the meat-thing.”

****

Newly incarnated, Harvest Moon and Scented Coolabar stood upon the Heaven
Plain of Hoy. Clouds black as regret bruised the upcurved horizon. Lightning fretted
along the edge of the world. Harvest Moon shivered at a fresh sensation; stringent
but not unpleasant—not in that brief frisson, though her new meat told her that in
excess it might become not just pain-ful, but dangerous.

“What was that?” she commented, observing the small pimples rising on her
space-black skin. She wore a close-to-species-modal body: female in this
incarnation; elegant, hairless, attenuated, the flesh of a minimalist aesthete.

“I think it was the wind,” said Scented Coolabar who, as ever, played against
her Captain’s type and so wore the fresh flesh of a Dukkhim, one of the distinctive
humanesque subspecies that had risen after a mass-extinction event on the world of
Kethrem, near-lost in the strata of Clade history. She was small and broad, all ovals
and slits, and possessed of a great mane of elaborately decorated hair that grew to
the small of the back and down to the elbows. The crew of the Ever-Fragrant
Perfume of Divinity was incarnate mere minutes, and already Harvest Moon wanted
to play play play with her engineer’s wonderful mane. “Maybe you should have put
some clothes on.” Now thunder spilled down the tilted bowl of the world to shake
the small stone stupa of the incarnaculum. “I suppose we had better get started.”
The Dukkhim had ever been a dour, pragmatic subspecies.

Harvest Moon and Scented Coolabar spent the night in a live-skin yurt
blistered from the earth of Hoy. The thunder cracked, the yurt flapped and boomed
in the wind, and the plain of Hoy lowed with storm-spooked grazebeastlis, but none
so loud or so persistent as Harvest Moon’s moans and groans that her long black
limbs were aching, burning; her body was dying dying.
 “Some muscular pain is to be expected in the first hours of incarnation,”
chided the yurt gently. “As muscle tone develops these pains generally pass within a
few days.”

“Days!” wailed Harvest Moon. “Tload me back up right now.”

“I can secrete general analgesia,” said the tent. So until the lights came up all
across the world on the sky roof ten kilometers overhead, Harvest Moon suckled
sweetly on pain-numb milk from the yurt’s fleshy teat, and, in the morning, she and
Scented Coolabar set out in great, low-gravity bounds across the Heaven Plain of
Hoy in search of Rose of Jericho. This inner-most of the Heart-world meat levels
had long been the preserve of ascetics and pilgrim souls; the ever upcurving plain
symbolic, perhaps, of the soul’s quest for its innate spiritual manifestation, or maybe
because of its proxim-ity to the virtual realms, above the sky roof, where the ploads
constructed universe within universe, each bigger than the one that contained it. Yet