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

more than growth tests, Opie? If so, I’m disappointed.”
The genetics crew had set up an experimental station on the surface of the
Ganapati, off limits to everyone else.
Opie smiled. “I’m not answerable to you.”
This was greeted with shouts and jeers. The science crews were tired and on edge,
and the room was hot and poorly ventilated.
“Information should be free,” Margaret said. “We all work towards the same end. Or
are you hoping for extra bonuses, Opie?”
There was a murmur in the room. It was a tradition that all bonuses were pooled
and shared out between the various science crews at the end of a mission.
Opie Kindred was a clever, successful man, yet somehow soured, as if the world was
a continual disappointment. He rode his team hard, was quick to find failure in others.
Margaret was a natural target for his scorn, a squat muscle-bound unedited dwarf
from Earth who had to take drugs to survive in micro-gravity, who grew hair in all
sorts of unlikely places. He stared at her with disdain and said, “I’m surprised at the
tone of this briefing, Dr Wu. Wild speculations built on nothing at all. I have sat here
for an hour and heard nothing useful. We are paid to get results, not generate
hypotheses. All we hear from your crew are excuses when what we want are samples.
It seems simple enough to me. If something is upsetting your proxies, then you should
use robots. Or send people in and handpick samples. I’ve worked my way through
almost all you’ve obtained. I need more material, especially in light of my latest
findings.”
“Robots need transmission relays too,” Srin Kerenyi pointed out.
Orly Higgins said, “If you ride them, to be sure. But I don’t see the need for human
control. It is a simple enough task to programme them go down, pick up samples,
return.” She was the leader of the crew that had unpicked the AI’s corrupted code, and
was an acolyte of Opie Kindred.
“The proxies failed whether or not they were remotely controlled,” Margaret said,
“and on their own they are as smart as any robot. I’d love to go down there myself, but
the Star Chamber has forbidden it for the usual reasons. They’re scared we’ll get up to
something if we go where they can’t watch us.”
“Careful, boss,” Srin Kerenyi whispered. “The White Mice are bound to be
monitoring this.”
“I don’t care,” Margaret said. “I’m through with trying polite requests. We need to
get down there, Srin.”
“Sure, boss. But getting arrested for sedition isn’t the way.”
“There’s some interesting stuff in the upper levels,” Arn Nivedta said. “Stuff with
huge commercial potential, as you pointed out, Opie.”
 Murmurs of agreement throughout the crowded room. The Reef could make the
Ganapati the richest habitat in the Outer System, where expansion was limited by the
availability of fixed carbon. Even a modest-sized comet nucleus, ten kilometres in
diameter, say, and salted with only one hundredth of one per cent carbonaceous
material, contained fifty million tons of carbon, mostly as methane and carbon
monoxide ice, with a surface dusting of tarry long chain hydrocarbons. The problem
was that most vacuum organisms converted simple carbon compounds into organic
matter using the energy of sunlight captured by a variety of photosynthetic pigments,
and so could only grow on the surfaces of planetoids. No one had yet developed
vacuum organisms that, using other sources of energy, could efficiently mine
planetoids interiors, but that was what accelerated evolution appeared to have
produced in the reef. It could enable exploitation of the entire volume of objects in the