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

She looked up, following the trunk. The first few branches started very far above her head. The top of the tree was too distant for her to make out. It had to end short of the roof, she could see that, and it—she was in a bowl! No, a ball full of things she had never seen.
Her stomach lurched as she noticed paths spiraling up away from her. The world was inside out. On Selene, the horizon curved away from her. Here, it encircled her, turning completely and returning to her in an arc. She blinked and stared, her mind racing as it tried to make sense of something that shouldn't work. Vegetation and planter boxes climbed up the sides of the round garden when they should have been sliding down into a pile.
It took a long time for details to resolve.
Scents even richer than Selene's assailed her, sweet flowery smells, like the greenhouse back home, only twice as strong and unfamiliar.
There was only the one giant tree, right in the middle.
Strung between the trunk and the—walls?—of the ball, lines of flowers fell away like spokes. The long strands of flowers near the trunk bore blossoms as tall as she was, dwarfing anything she had seen on Selene. Bright yellow strings held flowers in lines between the tree trunk and the walls. So maybe ropes held everything up? They'd have to be strong.
Movement filled empty places. Wings flashed and spiraled, their shapes giving them away as human flyers. The wings reminded her of colorful butterflies from the lawn at Teaching Grove. Other shapes flew too; circles and squares and spindles and lines that must be machines.
The lighting was strange—a bright light from above drove the shadows one way, and in places more lights made faint second or even third shadows, like Selene in summer, when Apollo and Harlequin both lit the surface. She had studied a hundred plants on Selene, loving the way they reached for light and the variation in leaf and stem and flower. Here were a hundred times a hundred plants, the pull of various lighting and shadows making them all fantastic, beautiful, and mysterious.
"This will be your school."
Kyu Ho's voice brought her awareness back. She was still falling, but Kyu Ho wasn't. The smaller woman was on a pebbled path, a dozen meters out from the tree.
Rachel pushed herself down, turned, and touched down with her feet. She was proud of that.
And she was ravenous. Breakfast had been delayed by hours.
Kyu Ho said, "That's Yggdrasil, the Mid-tree. We designed it specifically to grow along the axis of rotation, and had to try twenty times to get one that stayed healthy and grew straight. This tree is over a thousand years old."
Rachel gulped. It seemed impossible.
Kyu Ho led Rachel in a bounding walk along a wide path in the middle of a set of boxes that overflowed with green, starting as a rim around the base of the Mid-tree's trunk, sloping gently up. The walkway was rough, a gray painted surface that made dull hollow sounds as they walked on it. It seemed pebbled, though there were no loose pebbles to turn into missiles when John Glenn maneuvered.
They walked a spiral, and after two turns around the base of the giant tree, they came upon a rack of wings. Kyu handed a set to Rachel. They were similar to the wings she flew on Selene, except that every detail was perfect, metal polished, joints and straps glowing with quality.
Kyu turned and looked at Rachel. "It is important for you to stay with me. Gravity here varies. It's made by spin—and so the part of the sphere that would be an equator on a planet is the heaviest. We put the river there." She laughed. "Or maybe the river put itself there. Spin gravity, centrifugal force, holds the water in place. The poles only have gravity equal to our thrust—that is, they only have gravity if our engines are pushing us. Right now, they're not. You felt weightless at the tree. We were on the zero gee line in that tube—remember the tube?—and between us and the zero line there is storage, work labs, and the Mid-tree's root system"—she pointed toward the huge central tree—"which you're standing just above."
Rachel shifted her feet. Her body was light, and she felt like a push would send her flying.
Kyu continued. "This is aft. We usually come in 'fore'—above the tree, but then you have to deal with zero gee, and the Sun Lamp. The Lamp rotates twenty degrees aft of fore, and you need dark glasses to come in fore. Besides, it's farther from the cafeteria. See the river?"
Rachel squinted. A broad ribbon of blue divided the sphere in half along the inside-out equator. Half of it was simply blue, and half shimmered in light that was whiter and more intense than high summer in Aldrin.
"There's full gravity—Earth gravity—at the river. But we'll save that for another day. Today, we'll have breakfast at the main kitchen and get you oriented. Now, Gabriel says flight on Selene is easy compared to this—so don't think you know anything. Here we have to adjust for varying gravity, wind schedules, and for airborne machines like monitoring bots. If you go fast enough, you'll feel a stinging. That's nanotech air scrubbers that don't get out of your way fast enough. They won't hurt you. You won't see them. Don't fly alone until you get used to it, and for now, follow me." Kyu took three steps to gather speed, and arced into the air. Her wings were blue and yellow, shining and glittering as light hit them, matching her hair and clothes.
Rachel's three steps and a leap catapulted her past Kyu on the first try. Startled, out of control, she spread her wings and floated down. She improved, and followed the graceful High Councilwoman a short distance to set down on a large empty patio right in front of an unusually tall boxy planter. Vines covered the outside of the planter, falling from above Rachel's head almost to her feet, covered in tiny yellow flowers. They shelved the flying gear, and Kyu pulled open a door at the base of the big planter.
The door opened into a big room full of light and people.
A large table was piled with fruit and bread. Round bulbs with nipples held juice and water. Nearly a dozen people sat in small groups at round tables. None were as tiny or brightly dressed as Kyu. Everyone was shorter than Rachel. Every head turned toward Rachel and Kyu as silence fell. Two women came over to them. Kyu introduced them. "These are Mary and Helga—they work on the garden here."
The taller woman, Mary, nodded and said, "Hello, Rachel."
Kyu hadn't mentioned her name. Rachel, puzzled, said, "Pleased to meet you."
"Can we join you?" Helga addressed Kyu.
Kyu shook her head. "Perhaps another time."
Kyu led Rachel to the food table, and helped her select berries and bread and strips of something odd: artificial bacon, she said. Rachel liked it.
"How did they know me?" Rachel asked.
"We watch what happens on Selene." Kyu led them to a table.
"So we, we're another experiment?"
"Not exactly. You are ... let me try again. We limit the kinds of tools we use. Certain things need to be done by humans. We could have shaped Selene with nothing but machines, but we would have had to use machines smarter than we wanted them to be. Machines that are too smart are dangerous."
Rachel thought about it. "Well, the planters are pretty smart."
"They need humans to run them. Besides, humans adapt to change better than the level of machines we authorize for Selene. There's more to intelligence than doing complex tasks. Adapting is, in fact, your real job. That's why humans work so much better than robots." Kyu twisted her hands through her hair, fingernails flashing glittery light. "I have high hopes for you. Selene is changing as we make it—and we're learning too. This is the biggest terraforming project anyone has ever done, anywhere. Mars was nothing compared to this. People react to the unexpected better than machines. The only program that might be better at that than us is an AI, but AI goals aren't human goals."
Rachel nodded (AI?) and Kyu continued. "You know we need to build industry here? It takes a lot of people to build an antimatter collider. There aren't enough Council to do that, or even Colonists."
Rachel saw the opportunity to learn one thing she and Harry wanted to know. "What's the difference between Council and Colonists?"
"There are two hundred Council. We are collectively responsible for the ship. We financed it—" Kyu shook her head. "Sorry—we made it possible to build John Glenn. We planned this trip. Five of us are High Council, and have ultimate responsibility for everyone. There are a lot of Colonists—people picked to come because they have specific knowledge we will need when we get to Ymir. And we can't afford to wake them all up here—we'll need them on Ymir. It would be horrible to risk everyone from Earth someplace as dangerous as Selene when we'll need their genes and Earth-educated minds more later."
Rachel swallowed. "So you risk us instead?"
Kyu didn't answer.
"And so you really will leave?" Rachel asked.
"We can't live here forever—we don't have enough resources. Have you seen pictures of Ymir?"
Rachel shook her head. "Gabriel talked about it once."
"Ymir is his dream. Some of us dream of Earth...." Kyu's voice trailed off. "But it's not there anymore."
"How could a planet not be there? Gabriel says that's impossible!"
"Selene wasn't here before we got here. Eat."
Obediently, gratefully, Rachel bit into the bread and found it tasted tangy, like citrus, and so soft it melted away as soon as she ate it.
Kyu Ho continued. "We grow a number of things here that you don't yet have on Selene. Some will never grow there—they need different gravity, or different lighting, or are just too hard to alter for a semitropical environment like Selene's. You'll be here at least three months—you'll study in a jungle area we've designed as close to what we're trying for on Selene as we can get in this small a space."
Small? Rachel thought. This place is huge. Where the river runs, it must be as wide as the whole ship!
A tall dark-haired man came in the door and Kyu excused herself. Rachel sat at the table and experimented with the melty bread. Even berries were fatter and juicier here. Where was Gabriel? Why did Kyu seem so interested in her? If she was above even Gabriel {even Gabriel!), why was she spending time with Rachel? What did they really want? Why bring Rachel here?