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

passed directly above the top of a convection cell, those huge, slow elevators that
brought up heat from the core, Carver caught a glimpse of the deep interior, a
fugitive flash of brighter red flecked with orange and yellow.

And at every tenth orbit, the tug passed over the permanent storm at the
brown dwarf’s equator, the location of the anomalous neutrino flux that had drawn
Dr. Smith and the !Cha to Ganesh Five B. The storm’s pale lens was more than
fifteen thousand kilometers across; probes dropped into it discovered a complex
architecture of fractal clusters crawling and racheting around each other like the gears
of an insanely complicated mechanism bigger than the Earth. They also discovered
that it was no longer emitting neutrinos, and it was breaking up along its edges—the
tug’s AIs estimated that it would break up in less than ten years.

While the tug swung around the brown dwarf’s dim fires, Carver thought
about the !Cha and what he had to do when the tug returned to Sheffield, and he lost
himself in memories of his dead brother. He and Jarred had been close, two Navy
brats following their parents from base to base, system to system. Although Jarred
had been two years younger than Carver, he’d also been brighter and bolder, a
natural leader, graduating at the top of his class in the Navy academy. The war had
already begun when he graduated; the day after his passing-out parade, he followed
Carver into active duty.

The last time Carver had seen Jarred, they’d spent three days together in the
port city of Our Lady of the Flowers, Persopolis. It was the beginning of Jarred’s
leave, the end of Carver’s. The night before Carver shipped out, they bar-hopped
along the city’s famous Strand. The more Jarred drank, the more serious and
thoughtful he became. He told Carver that whichever side won the war, both would
have to work hard at the peace if humanity was to have any chance at surviving.

“War only happens when peace breaks down. That’s why peace is harder
work, but more worthwhile.”

“We defeat the Collective, we impose terms,” Carver said. “Where’s the
problem?”

“If we won the war and imposed terms on the Collective, forced it to change,
it would be an act of aggression,” Jarred said. “The Collective would respond in
kind and there would be another war. Instead of forcing change, we have to establish
some kind of common ground.”

“We don’t have anything in common with those slavers.”

“We have more in common with them than with the Jackaroo, or the Pale, or
the !Cha. And if we don’t find some way of living together,” Jarred said, “we’ll
grow so far apart that we’ll end up destroying each other.”

He started to tell Carver about a loose network of people who were
dis-cussing how to broker a lasting peace, and Carver said that he didn’t want to
hear about it, told Jarred he should be careful, what he and his friends were doing
sounded a little like treason. Now, in the cramped lifesystem of the tug, endlessly