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

“We are not happy with the progress of your survey, Dr Wu,” Dzu Sho said. “You
promise much, but deliver little.”
Margaret shot a glance at Opie Kindred, and he smiled at her. He was immaculately
dressed in gold-trimmed white tunic and white leggings. His scalp was oiled and his
manicured fingernails were painted with something that split light into rainbows.
Margaret, fresh from the tank, wore loose, grubby work greys. There was sticky
electrolyte paste on her arms and legs and shaven scalp, the reek of sour sweat under
her breasts and in her armpits.
She contained her anger and said, “I have submitted daily reports on the problems
we encountered. Progress is slow but sure. I have just established a relay point a full
kilometre below the previous datum point.”
Dzu Sho waved this away. He lounged in a blue gel chair, quite naked, as smoothly
fat as a seal. He had a round, hairless head and pinched features, like a thumbprint
on an egg. The habitat’s lawyer sat behind him, a young woman neat and anonymous
in a grey tunic suit. Margaret, Opie Kindred and Arn Nivedta sat on low stools,
supplicants to Dzu Sho’s authority. Behind them, half a dozen servants stood at the
edge of the grassy space.
 This was in an arbor of figs, ivy, bamboo and fast-growing banyan at the edge of
Sho’s estate. Residential parkland curved above, a patchwork of spindly, newly
planted woods and meadows and gardens. Flyers were out, triangular rigs in primary
colours pirouetting around the weightless axis. Directly above, mammoths the size of
large dogs grazed an upside-down emerald green field. The parkland stretched away
to the ring lake and its slosh barrier, three kilometres in diameter, and the huge farms
that dominated the inner surface of the habitat. Fields of lentils, wheat, cane fruits,
tomatoes, rice and exotic vegetables for the tables of the citizens, and fields and fields
and fields of sugar cane and oilseed rape for the biochemical industry and the yeast
tanks.
Dzu Sho said, “Despite the poor progress of the survey crew, we have what we need,
thanks to the work of Dr Kindred. This is what we will discuss.”
Margaret glanced at Arn, who shrugged. Opie Kindred’s smile deepened. He said,
“My crew has established why there is so much diversity here. The vacuum organisms
have invented sex.”
“We know they have sex,” Arn said. “How else could they evolve?”
His own crew had shown that the vacuum organisms could exchange genetic
material through pili, microscopic hollow tubes grown between cells or hyphal strands.
It was analogous to the way in which genes for antibiotic resistance spread through
populations of terrestrial bacteria.
“I do not mean genetic exchange, but genetic recombination,” Opie Kindred said. “I
will explain.”
The glade filled with flat plates of colour as the geneticist conjured charts and
diagrams and pictures from his slate. Despite her anger, Margaret quickly immersed
herself in the flows of data, racing ahead of Opie Kindred’s clipped explanations.
It was not normal sexual reproduction. There was no differentiation into male or
female, or even into complementary mating strains. Instead, it was mediated by a
species that aggressively colonized the thalli of others. Margaret had already seen it
many times, but until now she had thought that it was merely a parasite. Instead, as
Opie Kindred put it, it was more like a vampire.
A shuffle of pictures, movies patched from hundreds of hours of material collected by
roving proxies. Here was a colony of the black crustose species found all through the
explored regions of the Rift. Time speeded up. The crustose colony elongated its