"Larry Niven & Steve Barnes - Achilles choice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

appraisal as merciless as the grade.
She unclipped the plastic bottle at her side, and sipped shallowly. Thin, faintly sweet,
with a briny edge. The drink was custom-formulated from analysis of her own sweat, a nutrient
solution composed chiefly of water and long-chain glucose polymers, with a few electrolyte
minerals judiciously added. Jillian thought the sweat tasted better.
The air would heat soon. Morning chills burned off quickly of late, unusual for
Pennsylvania in late March. April and May would be hot.
She squeezed the bottle closed with her teeth, and pushed onward. Halfway through now.
Sean Vorhaus would be meeting her for the last two miles of the run. With the first tickle of
fatigue her mind, ordinarily the most orderly of instruments, began to wander. She focused, and
continued to dictate.
"Beverly: note. Mind seeks patterns. Predictions. Wrong here. Old math . . . says
weather's chaotic. Initial conditions. Disease, money, whatever. Try crime. Greek poets, storm. .
. metaphor for personal change. Proposal-"
She panted, and wiped away the trickle of sweat oozing from beneath her terry-cloth


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headband. Her breathing normalized swiftly, and she continued.
"-use fractals, predict-global sociopolitical patterns. Determine where chaos rules human
life-"
Funny how concise these notes always were. When she was running, she couldn't spare the
breath! An athlete training at a reasonable level should still be able to talk . . . and unable to
sing; who was it tried that? And Beverly would edit out the gasping.
In print it would come out more like, "Although the human mind functions so as to seek
patterns and predictability within chaos, the peculiar mathematics of my chosen field suggest that
the only pattern ultimately discernible in weather is chaos itself. Weather is very sensitive to
initial conditions, as is disease con-
trol, the relative value of currency, and whatever else I can come up with. This approach might be
used to reduce crime rates. But note: the Greek poets used storms as metaphors for drastic changes
in human existence. Proposal: although currently considered impractical, I believe that fractals
can be used to predict global sociopolitical patterns. The trick is to determine the degree to
which chaos itself is a controlling factor in human life-"
The path split and she automatically chose the high road. The old mine lay at the feet of
the Allegheny mountains, and had once been a source of coal and natural gas.
Energy sources and environmental concerns had shifted drastically in the last hundred
years. Thanks to the Council, there were probably forty billion tons of coal in the Pennsylvania
earth that would never be harvested. How many tons of smog did that translate into? How many
square miles of soot-stained lung tissue?
The deserted mine was an atavistic eyesore, a raw, mile-wide slash. Long ago, men had
ripped coal from the earth, made it bleed black, carted away its flesh to heat homes and
industrial furnaces. Today the Council had decreed cleaner sources: solar satellites, geothermal
stations, fusion reactors.
The strip mine lay before Jillian, around her, a barren womb. Its grueling inclines and
sudden, twisty depths were a challenge to mind and body, an ideal preparation for the rigors to
come.
So lost in reverie was Jillian that she failed to hear Sean's familiar rhythmic stride
until he was ten feet away.