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

Chapter 14: High Council


The light of stars and planets shone on Gabriel from all directions. Pictures streamed through John Glenn's net, painting his walls with views of space. Windows of data hung, scrolled, and flickered between Gabriel and the walls, bright orange and yellow displays against a background of space. The vital statistics of the metal and diamond ship enfolded him, and galaxies and stars surrounded everything. It was ritual to close his office and bathe in information when he returned to John Glenn. Embedded links strung through his body woke, reacting to the richness of wireless information streams they were tuned for. Gabriel activated them one by one, focusing on each distinct flow and then letting it fall silent, to stay available on demand. He filled himself until he felt connected to the ship again, until the blood of data thrummed inside him like his own personal music.
The office was nearly empty of furnishings, the floor black. Gabriel stood in the center of infinite views. He stretched slowly through basic yoga poses, refamiliarizing his body with the Earth-normal gravity of the ship.
"Astronaut?"
"Yes?"
"Just checking."
"Welcome home."
He ran a data abstract on the ice chambers in the sleeping bays. He requested data about Erika. Her feeds were perfect flat lines; no spikes warned of possible dangers.
Next, the garden. Seed stocks, seedlings, air quality, the river. All fine. Gabriel superimposed camera shots in front of space vistas, obscuring whole galaxies with pictures of planters full of healthy sprouts and hanging flower baskets. He magnified views of the all-important liquid nutrient mixtures surrounding roots. Zooming back out, he spotted a salmon in the river. Now, whose idea was that? How in heck would a salmon spawn in a river that ran in a loop? He asked Astronaut to pursue, low priority.
He called up lists, reviewing contents of bays and the available small ships. All fine, of course. He cam-scanned the halls. Everything had a place. John Glenn had space and high ceilings and room in plenty for a starship, thanks to the gift of antimatter as a fuel. All of it was used for something: for storage, for workouts, for water, for air. The smell, even here in his office, was the deep tang of metal and oil, the controlled scent of scrubbed air. His eyes absorbed brilliant colors and visible data streams, shifting wall pictures, and the many color and shape codes indicating pipes and doorways and ladders and directions.
Gabriel groaned, twisted his hair loose of its Selene binding, and started the less interesting job of catching up on Council discussions.
Minutes of High Council meetings. He skimmed lists of watches and planting cycles, duty rotations on Selene, and nutrient fluctuations in the garden. When he got to the last set of minutes, he spotted Ma Liren's call for a formal High Council meeting.
Why did Liren want him here in person?
He erased the displays and stood still in the darkness, feeling the thrum of the ship all around him.


RACHEL LAY IN the oddly soft bed and stared at the metal ceiling. The room was easily twice as large as her tent room at home, but the walls felt closer, and they didn't smell right. She realized now how tent fabric trapped the smell of cooking in the walls, how soil blown in by wind left a scent. Floating in the strange bed, the differences washed over her, each whispering how far she was from home. The room was simple. There was a bed, and barely recognizable toilet facilities—she'd had to figure out how to use them—and insets that must be drawers or storage. Everything was white or silver or black. Her own room at home was a riot of color and clutter. She shivered. Maybe the beds were so soft because everything else was so hard and sterile?
She tried her wrist pad. It obeyed, opening a window in the air above her head. She filled the window with words. She described the flight as best she could, the feel of gravity shifting, the shape of John Glenn as they approached, the carrier's surprising size. Some intuition kept her descriptions simple, a sureness that what she wrote would be read by strangers, which was different from knowing that it could be. After she addressed her note and sent it to her dad, to Ursula, and to Harry, it occurred to her to wonder if it would find its way to Aldrin. Gabriel talked to people on the ship from Selene. She had seen him do it.
She smiled, thinking about Harry. She felt his kiss, the pressure of his arm on her shoulder, his weight on her stomach. Her breath came faster. She wanted to hold him, feel him near her, hear his voice. She rolled onto her stomach and cried, hoping no one would walk in the door. The only people she wanted to see were on Selene.
Rachel dreamed she and Harry were looking all over the unfamiliar ship for Ursula and Andrew, and they couldn't find either one.
When she woke, sweaty and worried, all three of them had written back. She smiled and started scrolling through her messages.
Her dad: "Hey, how are you? I'm glad you're safe. I spent the day fixing a control out at the solar plant, and when I looked up at the sky I hoped to see you."
Ursula wrote paragraphs of remorse for arguing, and continued the argument. Rachel gave up before finishing and filed the message to be reread later. She opened the one from Harry last, afraid of it and longing for it. "I'm glad you are safe. I miss you already. Record everything. Harry." That was so Harry.
Before she had time to respond to Ursula, the door opened and Kyu Ho walked into the room, dressed all in blues and yellows, even to blue streaks of color in her hair. "Good morning, did you sleep well?"
Rachel blinked at her, flipping the data window down and closed. "Yes."
"Join me for breakfast in the garden."
It wasn't a question. Rachel had to work to push herself up from the soft bed.
Kyu showed her a shower tucked into a wall behind a door, and pushed open a drawer that held soft green pants and a white shirt. Kyu sat on Rachel's bed and waited silently while Rachel got ready to go. Rachel wished she'd go and come back, but Kyu ignored Rachel's embarrassment and, in fact, just looked up at the wall and sometimes smiled or frowned. Rachel wondered if she was listening to voices inside her head.
As they passed down the corridor outside Rachel's room, her feet felt as if they wore brick shoes, and her lungs burned. Luckily, Kyu Ho walked more slowly than the night before. She didn't offer Rachel a hand.
The tiny woman glittered as faceted blue beads strung around her jumpsuit caught light. Black hair swung loose, with many thin, tight braids laced over the main fall of it. Kyu's eyes were large and almond-shaped, as black as her hair, and rimmed with blues. Her voice had a wide range, lilting up and down as she explained directions and conventions of shipboard travel to Rachel. Rachel wanted to ask her a million questions, but they stuck behind her teeth as she tried to listen, to watch Kyu, to remember details to tell Harry, and to walk, all at the same time.
The corridor ended in a boxy room. The door closed behind them and Rachel's stomach rushed into her throat as the floor moved. She fell against the wall. Kyu Ho smiled a little, her only comment on Rachel's predicament.
The room had tilted, and was rising. Her weight eased to Selene levels, and grew lighter yet. When the room stopped moving, they were falling.
The flight here had shown her free fall. She recognized it for what it was. She'd been tied down then, which made it tolerable. Now there was room to thrash. She held herself still, absorbing the sensation, remembering to breathe.
She was not going to die.
The door opened on a hallway. Kyu Ho stopped for a moment. "See that picture ... the one with the little squares on it? If you push that, you'll go back to the deck your room is on."
A row of ten symbols confronted Rachel. She pointed to a glowing dot. "That's where we are now?"
"Yes, good." Kyu nodded approvingly.
"Where do the rest of them go?"
"To the rest of the ship. For now, those two are all you need to know." Kyu turned and started down the hall.
Rachel pushed herself into the hallway—and thrashed helplessly in midair.
Kyu watched for a few seconds. She said, "You've had no training at all."
Embarrassment and anger made Rachel's cheeks hot. "Of course not! Where would I have training in how to fall? I fly. If I fell, I'd be dead!"
Kyu Ho nodded. She slowed while Rachel found ways to move. "Always know where your next handhold is. You'll learn ways to jump down a hallway. For now, jump only toward handholds. Turn like this—" Kyo Ho jumped off center, then pulled her arms and legs inward and spun. "You try it."
Rachel bumped her knuckles on a handhold and her head knocked against the wall. Kyu caught her before she could hurt herself. "Again."
And finally, "Shall we go?"
They negotiated another hallway, its walls littered with humming squares and round lines of piping, the floor a lacework of metal rather than a solid surface. Then a tube with handholds, a door, and Rachel gasped. To pass through that door was to leave cold mysterious metal for a riot of greens and brightness, exchanging hard lines and angles for leaves and curves.
She floated in ahead of Kyu, into a maze of huge roots, and out into the open.
Right in front of Rachel's nose, close enough to make out the rough texture, she saw the bark of a tree. The trunk was so thick she couldn't see around it.