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

They'd wondered about each other since, and they'd wondered about themselves. How could they not? Which of them would fail to give up longevity and the power to shape a world?
"Astronaut?"
"Hello, Gabriel!"
"Any word from Earth?" Gabriel already knew the answer.
"Not since Year 291, shiptime."
"From Ymir?"
"Nothing, Gabriel."
It might be that Gabriel was the only human heartbeat in the entire universe.
He flinched from that thought. Surely there were humans at Ymir. Surely Leif Eriksson and Lewis and Clark had reached Ymir, safe, and thousands or millions of humans now populated a rebuilt planet. Or billions? Ymir was to have been made a second Earth, and Earth had housed tens of billions, sixty thousand years ago. They'd sent message probes, traveling at a tenth light-speed at best, at the highpoint of their journey. A hundred forty-eight light-years distanced them, at Gliese 876, from Ymir at HDC 212776. That was a lot of distance for fragile probes to travel.
Gabriel wiggled his toes, stretched his fingers, and bounced his calves lightly on the bed.
Two hours later, he pushed himself to standing and went to the galley to make tea infused with vitamins and mint, easy for a rejuvenated and rebuilt body to accept. He took the tea to his office, wrinkling his nose at the medicinal smell, and ordered Astronaut to pull up views of Selene.
Bad smelling or not, the first sip of tea sat warm and perfect in his belly as images of the little moon filled his walls.
A cloud obscured part of the surface. A cloud! He smiled broadly, then laughed in delight. He sat mesmerized, watching the cloud, until his tea bulb was empty.
Then he started barking out a list for Astronaut to read to him: precipitation measures, exact atmospheric composition, water loss, evaporation...
Within an hour, Gabriel confirmed they could walk on the moon. They could start to introduce life. They could ... he gave instructions to wake Ali and Wayne, and went to get ready for them. He sang as he pulled himself down the corridor to Medical.

GABRIEL AND ALI WALKED on the barren surface of the little moon. They started inside light pressure suits, taking readings and checking radiation levels, double-testing what they already knew from the tiny sensors that dotted Selene. Ali stripped first, all the way down to underwear and bra and shoes, oxygen tank and mask. Her olive skin dimpled in the cool air.
He laughed with pleasure watching her; a tiny half-naked woman climbing on rocks; jumping from one to the other, tossing stones and catching them.
Drawn by Ali's antics, Gabriel stripped to his pants and shirt, mask and tank, and ran and cavorted and grinned while Ali knelt and touched the regolith, walked to a new place, and touched the surface again. He danced with her on the surface, seeing wonder and reverence in her eyes as she moved easily, gracefully.
Selene was still a touch unstable; it shivered twice with small quakes in the hours they were there. Ali came and stood beside him. "I like the silence—I like being away from that damned constant data flow. It feels more human here."
Gabriel held her, not answering, just feeling the soft touch of her dark head in the hollow of his shoulder. He felt lost without the data, regardless of how ecstatic he was to be on Selene. On Selene!
"Someday," he said, "Selene will be information rich like the ship. We'll enhance the flows some here before we return—I'll need it to monitor the next steps."
She glared at him, a touch distant suddenly. "Be careful—you'll need too much technology. Let's keep Selene simple."
Her face was bathed in Apollo's light, her skin duskier than he remembered from the ship. They pulled their masks aside, and he gave her the first kiss on Selene. It was quick. Selene had just barely more oxygen, right now, than the top of Everest. It needed life to make a living atmosphere.
Thousands of years of shifts had taught them all to take intimacy where they found it, to appreciate it, and consider it friendship.
They flew happily back up to John Glenn. Gabriel returned with Wayne, and while Gabriel and Wayne walked Selene's surface, Ali packed up cultures and genetic material so they could start seeding the regolith, eventually covering part of Selene with bacteria to begin the process of making soil.
When they warmed next, all of the bacteria were dead. So they stayed awake and watched the next attempt, killing time designing a huge tent. They would control the atmosphere inside the tent, and use it to build greenhouses and homes; a little city. The tent stood up well to the little earthquakes that came along. They dubbed the new town Aldrin, and stayed there from time to time.
It took four tries—twenty years—to get healthy cyanobacteria mats spread across the ground near Aldrin and have something like soil. Now it was time to wake the High Council.
Gabriel spent hours with each of them, running low on sleep, talking excitedly. He had Astronaut play videos for the captain; lost moons dancing into each other. Gabriel watched the captain's wrinkled face closely, saw how his deep-ocean-blue eyes tracked the flow of moons and proto-comets.
Captain John Hunter had stayed awake during the long crippled flight that took them to Gliese 876 after they nearly burned up in the interstellar wind. That trip was so long that no amount of post-ice rejuvenation treatments had removed the spots and lines and dark circles that transformed his face. Centuries of pain were etched in odd bends of his fingers and toes, in the hunch in his back, the folds over his eyes. But intelligence still lived in his eyes. If anything, the ravages his choices had created in his body made his will stronger. It mattered to Gabriel that John Hunter see the dream he'd helped design come alive.
It went well, except for the astonishing rapidity with which Council returned to the cryo-tanks. They wanted an easier world to oversee.
Once, Gabriel warmed Erika. By then, Wayne was building roads, using huge robotic machines to flatten the soil. Ali was cold. Gabriel was designing pipes to control the hydrology, and constructing a small factory by the Hammered Sea. Erika stayed warm for a year, giving Gabriel good advice, making a few mistakes they laughed at together, fretting about how long everything took. The plan was already foreshortened—Gabriel would never have forced so many processes if Selene wasn't really just a way to escape to the stars again.
He held Erika's attention for a year before she insisted on going cold again.
Gabriel and Ali finished the little town of Aldrin. They laid pipes to carry water to a cistern, more pipes to make a rudimentary sewer and reclamation system, planted a grove of trees on a hill outside town, and filled greenhouses with seedlings. The night before they planned to wake High Council again, Gabriel and Ali made love, alone on the surface of the moon they'd transformed. Their lovemaking started soft and slow, growing to a deep intimate conclusion. They stayed still for a long time, wrapped in each other's arms, warm in that close place that follows on the heels of lovemaking. When she stopped trembling, Ali looked at Gabriel and said, "We've consecrated the ground here. Selene has been blessed. We blessed it together."
Gabriel simply thought they'd enjoyed great sex, but it was a celebration, and so he didn't contradict her. Rather, he held her tightly and began to work out hydrologic engineering problems in his head.




Part 1: Selene


60,268 John Glenn shiptime




Chapter 1: Teaching Grove