"Linda Nagata - Vast" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nagata Linda)

use their host to reproduce the Chenzeme mind. Clearly this has happened many times before in the
thirty-milhon-year history of the Chenzeme, and it is the warships that have survived it, while their
challengers have all vanished.
All except us, Nikko thinks.
He is acutely aware that they play a dangerous game.
After the first cells were made, it took three years of experiments before they learned to feed the
young colony with nutrients delivered through the hull. Now the original cells have reproduced many
times over. Lot is learning to delve into their inherited histories, and with luck, he will discover the proper
radio hail to sooth a Chenzeme warship.
The warships are known to rendezvous in the void, to exchange cell histories encoded in dust.
How Nikko is aware of this is a mystery locked behind the black wall of another proscribed field, but
again, he makes no inquiries. It doesn't matter how Null Boundary's neural system came to be tainted by
the Chenzeme, just that it has, in a primitive way, so that Nikko too can distinguish meaning in the
cell-talk. He doesn't have Lot's talent. He is like a dog listening to its master's voice—aware of mood,
but deaf to specific meaning. Forever surprised by what Lot will say.

Chapter 1
The cramped arc of the transit bubble pressed on Lot like a gigantic, gentle hand, pushing him
sideways into the only soft tissue within the cold, brittle membrane of Chenzeme cells that coated Null
Boundary's hull. The philosopher cells glowed with an intense white light that Lot could feel even when
his eyes were closed. At this one point Nikko had created a vacuole beneath the membrane's fixed
surface, preventing it from bonding with the body of the ship. Lot thought of the site as a wound, because
the cell tissue here was slushy, like overripe fruit or decaying flesh, on the verge of freezing.
He sank into it, eager, and a little bit scared: this thin amalgam of living alien cells was all that lay
between him and hard vacuum. His gut clenched when he thought about it. He had no backups of
himself. But the membrane had been in existence for twenty-two years, and it had not failed yet.
In the wound, the philosopher cells were loosely attached to one another. They felt glassy and
granular as they molded around his shoulder, flowing up and into his ear, across his closely trimmed
scalp, and around his mouth. He kept one eye closed. Their touch was cold, though it was not
unbearable because the chemical reactions within the cells required relatively high temperatures.
Not high enough to suit Lot. The skin suit kept his body warm, but he'd left the hood off so as
not to block the tiny, drop-shaped silver glands of his sensory tears that studded his cheeks just beneath
his eyes. Now the right side of his face was embedded in the wound and it felt half frozen. He turned his
head to keep his nose in the transit bubble's thin pocket of air. Over most of the hull, the membrane was
a petrified layer only a few millimeters deep. Here in the wound it remained soft and it continually
thickened. Lot worried about that. He didn't want to drown in the cells.
Finally, his shoulder brushed the crisp tissue of the membrane's outer wall. Relief flooded him.
This time, he would sink no farther.
Over the past two years, Lot had spent up to fifteen hours a day with the cells, sometimes talking
to Urban about what he felt. Urban monitored his communications, seeking to interpret the cell-talk for
himself—and failing utterly. No surprise. Chenzeme thought was not like human thought. Lot could do
one or the other, but serious fudging was needed to bridge the two.
 Often, Lot just listened to the philosopher cells. Sometimes he would try to sway the waves of
competitive simulations that swept round and round the field, and sometimes he would introduce his own
notions to the tumult. Today though, he would try something new.
He closed his eyes, his heart beating hard in anticipation as he visualized the molecular structures
assembling within the pheromonal vats of his sensory tears.
Nikko was convinced they could establish a Chenzeme identity through radio hails. Lot was less
sure. Chenzeme radio signals were intricate and highly variable, but they were not immune to
counterfeit… a fact that had started Lot wondering if there might be another level of identification among