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

Kuiper Belt, and beyond, in the distant Oort Cloud. It was a discovery of incalculable
worth.
Arn Nivedta waited for silence, and added, “Of course, we can’t know what the
commercial potential is until the reef species have been fully tested. What about it,
Opie?”
“We have our own ideas about commercial potential,” Opie Kindred said. “I think
you’ll find that we hold the key to success here.”
Boos and catcalls at this from both the biochemists and the survey crew. The room
was polarizing. Margaret saw one of her crew unsheathe a sharpened screwdriver, and
she caught the man’s hand and squeezed it until he cried out. “Let it ride,” she told
him. “Remember that we’re scientists.”
“We hear of indications of more diversity in the depths, but we can’t seem to get
there. One might suspect,” Opie said, his thin upper lip lifting in a supercilious curl,
“sabotage.”
“The proxies are working well in the upper part of the Rift,” Margaret said, “and we
are doing all we can to get them operative further down.”
“Let’s hope so,” Opie Kindred said. He stood, and around him his crew stood too. “I’m
going back to work, and so should all of you. Especially you, Dr Wu. Perhaps you
should be attending to your proxies instead of planning useless expeditions.”
And so the seminar broke up in uproar, with nothing productive coming from it and
lines of enmity drawn through the community of scientists.
“Opie is scheming to come out of this on top,” Arn Nivedta said to Margaret
afterwards. He was a friendly, enthusiastic man, tall even for an outer, and as skinny
as a rail. He stooped in Margaret’s presence, trying to reduce the extraordinary
difference between their heights. He said, “He wants desperately to become a citizen,
and so he thinks like one.”
“Well, my god, we all want to be citizens,” Margaret said. “Who wants to live like
this?”
 She gestured, meaning the crowded bar, its rock walls and low ceiling, harsh lights
and the stink of spilled beer and too many people in close proximity. Her parents had
been citizens, once upon a time. Before their run of bad luck. It was not that she
wanted those palmy days back—she could scarcely remember them—but she wanted
more than this.
She said, “The citizens sleep between silk sheets and eat real meat and play their
stupid games, and we have to do their work on restricted budgets. The reef is the
discovery of the century, Arn, but God forbid that the citizens should begin to exert
themselves. We do the work, they fuck in rose petals and get the glory.”
Arn laughed at this.
“Well, it’s true!”
“It’s true we have not been as successful as we might like,” Arn said mournfully.
Margaret said reflectively, “Opie’s a bastard, but he’s smart, too. He picked just the
right moment to point the finger at me.”
Loss of proxies was soaring exponentially, and the proxy farms of the Ganapati were
reaching a critical point. Once losses exceeded reproduction, the scale of exploration
would have to be drastically curtailed, or the seed stock would have to be pressed into
service, a gamble the Ganapati could not afford to take.
And then, the day after the disastrous seminar, Margaret was pulled back from her
latest survey to account for herself in front of the chairman of the Ganapatis Star
Chamber.
****