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

I'd like to thank Larry Niven for taking on this project with me. Larry has had a longtime rule against collaborating with amateurs, and since this is my first novel-length work, I definitely qualified, at least when we started. This has been a multiyear project. I'm sure there were times when he was ready to throw away the manuscript, but instead he just pointed out ideas and characters that needed work, and helped me through; most important, he always believed in me. His hands, ideas, and words are throughout this novel, but like every good teacher, he made me write my way out of most of my messes. Any messes left in here are mine alone. Thanks, Larry!
Personal thanks as well to my family: to my dad, who explained the concept of mass multiple times, and asked about the book every time he talked to me (sure that I was doing great, even when I wasn't); to my mom; my son, David; and daughter-of-the-heart Lisha; my partner, Toni; and to Cindy Ross and Joe Green. Thanks also to Marilyn Niven, for being supportive of this project.

From Brenda and Larry:

Thanks to our agent, Eleanor Wood, for believing in this project, and for reviewing a very early draft and providing excellent suggestions. Thanks to Bob Gleason from Tor, our editor.
Thanks to Yoji Kondo, the rocket scientist and science fiction writer who writes as Eric Kotani. We needed a pair of stars to fit our story—to become Apollo and Ymir—and Yoji found them for us.
We'd both like to thank Steven Barnes, who introduced us, and has given us both many tools across many years. The Fairwood Writers read the whole novel in draft, and made many excellent suggestions. They are David Addleman, Darragh Metzger, John A. Pitts, Allan Rousselle, David R. Silas, Renee Stern, and Patrick and Honna Swenson. The members of the LARRYNIVEN-L list helped out with naming a planet. G. David Nordley spent time chatting with us about ship designs. We'd also like to thank the late Bob Forward for chats about this book, and for inspiring early star drive designs.




PROLOGUE: Chaos

Year 894, John Glenn shiptime

Erika was cold and Gabriel was warm. She wouldn't have been interested in this stuff anyway.
Erika was one pilot of the carrier John Glenn. John Glenn was currently at rest, safely orbiting wide around the gas giant planet Harlequin, and not in need of a pilot.
Gabriel headed the terraforming team, chartered to create a habitable moon from the jumble of raw material that made up Harlequin's moon system. Four of the team were warm now, far too many in the long term; but during these few decades they would accomplish most of what needed doing. Then they would wait for the moon system to settle down again.
The Large Pusher Tugs, all three of them, were thrusting hard against Moon Ten. Their fusion engines sprayed a trident of light across the sky. The lesser Moon Twenty-six was already in place, orbiting Moon One since last year. That orbit wasn't stable—it shrank steadily within the cloud of impact debris around Moon One—but that didn't matter. Moon Twenty-six would be gone in a few days.
Gabriel sent: "John Glenn calling LPT-1. Wayne, how you doing?"
"Nearly finished here, I think. Astronaut concurs. Check our orbit."
"I did that. Start shutting down the motors."
In four hours, Moon Ten was falling free.
When this phase was over, Harlequin's moons would have to be recounted. There would be fewer of them.
Gabriel considered a meal and sleep. The moons wouldn't collide for fifteen days yet... but he ordered a squeeze of stew and stayed at his post. One loose moon wouldn't matter; there was no living thing to be harmed in Harlequin's moon system, and minor accidents could be fixed. It was the LPTs he was worried about. Lose his spacecraft and he'd lose the game.
The peppery smell of warming vegetables and broth made his stomach rumble.
So. Where to park the pusher tugs?
He smiled. They'd be passing very near Moon Forty-one.
"Wayne? Bust your LPTs loose and get them into orbit. Here are the specs. I'm working out your next mission."
"When do we get some rest, boss?"
"I'll find you that too."
Gabriel ate slowly, savoring the celery and potatoes. John Glenn's internal garden was thriving. It had been a water tank when they left Sol system, and their diet had palled rapidly.
He had a plan. He could start on it tomorrow. Thrust would take a few hundred days. Harlequin would grow a little hotter; ultimately Moon One would too; and Erika, when she warmed, would love it.

Under Gabriel's guidance, Wayne's team lifted the Large Pusher Tugs from Moon Ten and set them drifting toward a rarefied region within Harlequin's frantically busy moon system. Wouldn't want them anywhere near the collision point.
It took him and the Astronaut program less than an hour to work up the next sequence.
The LPTs had tremendous acceleration when they weren't attached to larger masses. Their light outshone the sun, Apollo, by a lot. By the end of the day they were in loose orbit around Moon Forty-one.
Gabriel ate at his post while Wayne guided the LPTs to the surface, one by one. The hard part came next, as Wayne's team moored them against the bedrock core. The tugs were flattened structures, a Tokamak-style fusion thruster ringing one side, a cage of shock absorbers and anchors at the other. Placing anchors was tricky, because when the LPTs were set going, their thrust would start quakes.
Set them going on low thrust, let the blast backfire, they'd melt their way through volatiles down to bedrock. Then close the insulation ports and wait while the molten rock solidified over the next century. Gabriel's team would spend a hundred years cold, then warm again to finish the job.
But they'd finish adding volatiles and mass to Moon One before they went cold.

One OF THE LAST major movements of a complicated symphony was under way as Moon Ten approached Moon Twenty-six, which was in motion retrograde above Moon One.
There had been other collisions. Moon One was already a dust ball surrounded by a flattened ring that glowed in Apollo's light. It looked like Saturn in Sol system, with the ring system lightly twisted by Harlequin's massive gravity.
The oblate spheroids drifted together like flaming taffy. Gabriel watched the two moons eat each other's kinetic energy. Hot rock and volatiles churned in a twisting red-orange fireball and began to drift toward Moon One.
A raw sense of power tugged at the edges of Gabriel's attention as he forced his focus to stay narrow. He had to stay on top of this. Playing God carried awesome responsibility. His purpose was to create a habitable world, a staging area for the antimatter generator that would refuel the carrier John Glenn. That world, Selene, would need seas and gravity: more mass, more volatiles. Moon One must be built up.
Selene also needed radiation shielding.
Gabriel had been bashing moons together for more than three hundred fifty years, after many more years of research and simulation. Matters would have gone much faster in Ymir's system, he thought, a trace of bitterness still edging his thoughts. John Glenn's equipment wasn't designed for Apollo system. He was supposed to have two more carrier ships and all their resources to help him. Hell, he was supposed to be someplace else entirely. Apollo's inner rocky worlds were all missing, eaten as the gas giant Daedalus moved inward; anything he needed that wasn't among Harlequin's moons would have to be acquired from the Kuiper Belt. Comets were as far apart as they had been in Sol system, generally as far apart as the Sun from the Earth. Travel time expanded hugely. He was doing his damn best, but it was still taking forever.
He stretched and twisted, working his body, pulling out as much tension as he could.
Moons Ten and Twenty-six were history, a fireball above Moon One. Impacting like that, they'd turned a lot of their velocity into heat; but how much? The last time they tried this, with a different pair of moons, most of the mass from the collision had just dissipated. He'd look again in a hundred years.