"Niven, Larry - Building Harlequin's Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"How do you make so many miles of pipe?" Harry asked.
Gabriel frowned and looked at Ali, who licked her lip and said, "We use nanocytes," as if it were a dirty word. "Trillions of tiny machines. Just for raw materials," she qualified. The children looked puzzled.
"Someday I'll show you," Gabriel said, turning toward Harry. "So, do you understand the basics of our hydrology?"
"It's nice to see it. I understand it better than when you first told me."
"The cycle will vary as we get more plant cover. That's the beauty of a self-regulating system; we both watch for change and cause change.
Terraforming is one long search for balance. We can tweak the system—generate wind if we need it over the lake, affect the surface temperature—there's a soletta in geostationary orbit—"
Harry interrupted. "Soletta?"
"The soletta is a bank of mirrors that focuses light from Apollo onto Selene, increasing the insolation—the light level from Apollo. We can turn mirrors on or off to affect insolation and tweak the temperature and energy supply. It's working so well it's been virtually automatic longer than you've been alive."
"Which isn't very long," Ali said dryly. "And it was a fight. Gabriel has had to rebuild the touchy thing twice so far. Once a single asteroid from a swarm got past our defenses and smashed the mirrors to shards. There wasn't much atmosphere yet, so some of them made it to the surface. Wear shoes!"
Gabriel laughed. "You'd have to dig pretty far to find any remains of that glass."
Ali went on, unfazed. "Oh, and the second time, it just disappeared. Just flat disappeared. We were all cold, one of our long down times. Astronaut woke me up to say there was nothing there. Astronaut didn't see it happen: Selene was between John Glenn and the soletta when it disappeared. The soletta might be the single most fragile part of our whole system. But without it, we couldn't regulate temperature, and Selene would get too cold to live on.".
"Did you help him rebuild it?" Ursula asked Ali.
"I was cold. Erika did that."
"I haven't met Erika," Rachel observed. "Where is she?"
"Cold," Gabriel muttered.
Rachel turned her eyes on Gabriel, and he saw pain flash across them. "Like Mom?" she asked.
Ali's answer was sharp. "We don't know about your mom. Be patient."
Rachel's jaws clenched. She looked down into the crater as if she could see the bottom.
They brought out water bottles and lapsed into uncomfortable silence. Harlequin was almost straight above them now. "Can you see the water rising?" Gabriel asked.
"At the edges?" Rachel replied.
"The whole sea will be affected. A tide is a response to gravity—all of Selene feels the pull of Harlequin; the elasticity of water illustrates it."
Water crept up the sides of the great bowl below them. Rocks were slowly dampened by wind spray, and then submerged in rising waves.
Gabriel had seen this hundreds of times. He watched the children. He wanted them awed. Rachel and Harry stood side by side, both rapt and fully attentive. Ursula was on Rachel's far side, farther back, still sitting, craning her neck to see into the crater without being near the edge.
Gabriel leaned back, looking up at the gas giant overhead. The ring, of course, was edge on to him, bisecting the planet. A huge storm tracked slowly across the surface, the fractal edges of its motion lulling him into a near trance state. Ali's voice was backdrop; talk about tidal pulls and bulges. He heard her explain that most moons were tidally locked, that Selene's core had been once, and Selene would be again. Finally, he heard Rachel point out that the water level was falling. He took a deep breath and stood up, strapping on his wings.
They all stood at the edge, backs to the sea, and looked down over the long slope of the outside crater rim between silver threads of waterfall. White and red rock filled with pillows of pumice crunched under their feet. Below them was rocky ledge after rocky ledge; then, starting nearly a third of the way down, a gentle slope turning greener as it flowed into checkered fields.
One by one they ran and leaped up, snapping wings open in time to start the long flight down to Clarke Base. The children rose high in the thermals almost immediately, circling and swooping and chasing each other. Gabriel finessed his glide, letting his mind go completely into the flight, focusing on small muscles and tiny changes in air and wind. Calculations and vectors flowed in his head, and he followed them as best he could, changing the tilt of his legs or arms to follow the places his mind said he could take the flight, working to gain the most lift and speed from minute motions. He laughed to hear Rachel taunting Ursula, driving her to reach higher, higher.
Gabriel and Ali lagged behind, evaluating the children's flight.
The teens stopped halfway down the long slope. They hadn't even bothered to tell Gabriel or Ali. Gabriel used his radio to talk to Ali. "Let's lurk a bit behind them, and see if they get concerned."
Ali landed just ahead of him, graceful and quick as she swept her wings closed. They settled above the children, out of sight, and Gabriel released a camera-bot with instructions to hover above and behind the kids.
Ali looked worried, a small frown furrowing her brow. He guessed at her worry. "Rachel asked about her mom after the flare. What's this about Rachel's mother? Why did you tell her you can't find out what happened from here?"
"I checked the records." Ali's mouth was a tight line, and her eyes hugged the horizon.
"And?"
"She doesn't want to come back."
"We can't tell Rachel that," he said.
"You should," Ali said quietly.
"When she's older."
"Why not now? The girl deserves some honesty—this is important to her."
"This isn't a good time to upset her," Gabriel said.
"Better the sting of truth than a long painful uncertainty. Besides, we shouldn't try to control her world. She has to hear hard things to grow. You can't terraform people."
Gabriel bit his tongue. "I'd like to talk to her mother first. Is she awake?"
"She's cold."
Gabriel changed the subject. "Have you checked on Andrew?"
"No new damage today."
"We should never have given Andrew that second chance. It was a bad lesson for the others."
He was surprised to feel Ali lean into him, laughing, her serious demeanor broken. His mood didn't match hers, but he stripped wing gear from one arm anyway and laid it over her shoulders, asking, "What's gotten into you?"
"You're trying to control them. They're people, not stones or air."
"Picture ... Andrew moving a little moon when he gets a temper tantrum."
"Another sea in the wrong place? Andrew's Hissy Fit?" She tugged his braid. "They'll never get access to LPTs anyway. What about Andrew, though? Isn't he just a teenager pushing boundaries?"
Gabriel had shown Ali Andrew's destructive streak, what he'd done after they left. "He's refusing to learn discipline. We can't afford to let him run free—there's no time to babysit him."
"I mean, look, he's just a kid. We were right to give him a chance; we're right to limit him now. I meant it when I said I'd support you." Ali's black braid across his knees contrasted with the grays and reds of the slope as it fell away behind her. "But you still need to give them time to think for themselves. They have to be able to live after we're gone." Ali's voice was angry again. "Why are we even doing this?"