"Rats Of The System" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

"We'll miss the chance to collect the photon data. We're going to die whatever
we do, sailor. Let's make it worthwhile."
"Right."
"Why did you like them? The rats."
"Because they're survivors. Because they've managed to make a living from humans
ever since we invented agriculture and cities. Back on Earth, they were a vermin
species, small and tough and smart and fast-breeding, eating the same food that
people ate, even sharing some of the same diseases and parasites. We took them
with us into space because those same qualities made them ideal lab animals. Did
you know that they were one of the first mammal species to have their genome
sequenced? That's why there are so many gengineered varieties. We mostly bred
them for meat and fur and biologicals, but we also raised a few strains that we
sold as pets. When I was a little kid, I had a ruffled piebald rat that I loved
as much as any of my sisters and brothers. Charlie. Charlie the rat. He lived
for more than a thousand days, an awfully venerable age for a rat, and when he
died I wouldn't allow him to be recycled. My father helped me make a coffin from
offcuts of black oak, and I buried him in a glade in my favorite citrous
forest…"
The scientist said, "It sounds like a nice spot to be buried."
Carter said, "It's a good place. There are orchards, lots of little fields.
People grow flowers just for the hell of it. We have eighteen species of mammals
roaming about. All chipped of course, but they give you a feeling of what nature
must have been like. I couldn't wait to get out, and now I can't wait to get
back. How dumb is that?"
The scientist said, "I'd like to see it. Maybe you could take me on a picnic,
show me the sights. My family used to get together for a picnic every couple of
hundred days. We'd rent part of one of the parklands, play games, cook way too
much food, smoke and drink…"
"My father, he's a pretty good cook. And my mother leads a pretty good choral
group. We should all get together."
"Absolutely."
They smiled at each other. It was a solemn moment. Carter thought he should say
something suitable, but what? He'd never been one for speeches, and he realized
now that although the scientist knew his name—it was stitched to his suit—he
didn't know hers.
The scientist said, "The clock's ticking."
Carter said, "Yes, ma'am. I'll get this junk fixed up, and then I'll be right
back."
He welded the photon detectors to the blunt nose of the pod and cabled them up.
He prepped the antenna array. After the pod grazed the base of the flare, its
computer would compress the raw data and send it in an encrypted squawk aimed at
Keid, repeating it as long as possible, repeating it until the Fanatic
singleship caught up. It was less than ten thousand kilometers behind them now.
Ahead, the red dwarf filled half the sky, the jet a slender white thread rooted
in patch of orange and yellow fusion fire, foreshortening and rising above them
to infinity as they drove toward it. Carter said that its base looked like a
patch of fungal disease on an apple, and the scientist told him that the analogy
wasn't farfetched; before the science platform had been destroyed, one of the
research groups had discovered that there were strange nuclear reactions taking
place there, forming tons of carbon per second. She showed him a picture one of