"Paul J. McAuley - Reef" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Enki, named for one of the Babylonian gods of creation, had been lost among them. It
had become a legend, like the Children’s Habitat, or the ghost comet, or the pirate
ship crewed by the reanimated dead, or the worker’s paradise of Fiddler’s Green.
And then, forty-five years after the end of the Quiet War, a data miner recovered
enough information to reconstruct Enki’s eccentric orbit. She sold it to the Ganapati.
The habitat bought time on the Uranus deep space telescopic array and confirmed
that the planetoid was where it was supposed to be, currently more than seven
thousand million kilometres from the Sun.
Nothing more was known. The experiment might have failed almost as soon as it
begun, but potentially it might win the Ganapati platinum-rated credit on the Bourse.
Margaret and the rest of the science crews would, of course, receive only their fees and
bonuses, less deductions for air and food and water taxes, and anything they bought
with scrip in the habitat’s stores; the indentured workers would not even get that. Like
every habitat in the Commonwealth, the Ganapati was structured like an ancient
Greek Republic, ruled by share-holding citizens who lived in the landscaped
parklands of the inner surface, and run by indentured and contract workers who were
housed in the undercroft of malls and barracks tunnelled into the Ganapatis rocky
skin.
On the long voyage out, the science crews had been on minimal pay, far lower than
that of the unskilled techs who worked the farms and refineries, and the servants who
maintained the citizens’ households. There were food shortages because so much
biomass was being used to make exportable biochemicals; any foodstuffs other than
basic rations were expensive, and prices were carefully manipulated by the habitat’s
Star Chamber. When the Ganapati reached Enki and the contracts of the science
crews were activated, food prices had increased accordingly. Techs and household
servants suddenly found themselves unable to afford anything other than dole yeast.
Resentment bubbled over into skirmishes and knife-fights, and a small riot the White
Mice, the undercroft’s police, subdued with gas. Margaret had to take time off to bail
out several of her crew, had given them an angry lecture about threatening
everyone’s bonuses.
“We got to defend our honour,” one of the men said.
“Don’t be a fool,” Margaret told him. “The citizens play workers against science
crews to keep both sides in their places, and still turn a good profit from increases in
food prices. Just be glad you can afford the good stuff now, and keep out of trouble.”
“They were calling you names, boss,” the man said. “On account you’re—”
Margaret stared him down. She was standing on a chair, but even so she was a good
head shorter than the gangling outers. She said, “I’ll fight my own fights. I always
have. Just think of your bonuses and keep quiet. It will be worth it. I promise you.”
And it was worth it, because of the discovery of the reef.
At sometime in the deep past, Enki had suffered an impact that had remelted it and
split it into two big pieces and thousands of fragments. One lone fragment still orbited
Enki, a tiny moonlet where the AI that had controlled the experiment had been
installed; the others had been drawn together again by their feeble gravity fields, but
had cooled before coalescence had been completed, leaving a vast deep chasm, Tigris
Rift, at the lumpy equator.
Margaret’s crew had discovered that the vacuum organisms had proliferated wildly
in the deepest part of the Rift, deriving energy by oxidation of elemental sulphur and
ferrous iron, converting carbona-ceous material into useful organic chemicals. There
were crusts and sheets, things like thin scarves folded into fragile vases and chimneys,
organ pipe clusters, whips, delicate fretted laces. Some fed on others, one crust slowly