"G. David Nordley - After the Vikings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nordley G. David)

solar wind as such.”

“But it did, and several times. Look at all the dry riverbeds, the eroded volcanoes, and the newer ones.”

“Still bubbling a little then?”

“A little. It takes a long time for heat to build up enough to make it burp. But I think it could still happen.
There’s probably a lot of neat stuff under those lava flows, but we’ve had our best luck in the shore
deposits.”

“Near what used to be oceans?”

“A few ropes above the ideal ellipsoid.”

“Anything new?”

“Well, for about three billion revolutions before the avians, there were some furry creatures, that could,
from their skeletons, move about on two or four limbs. They were,” she shrank in disgust “inside-out folk
— with their soft parts in a bag of rubbery tissue around their hard bones.”

“Is that possible?”

Eldest Daughter fluttered tentacles. “I just told you it was, Father. They liked to carve reliefs of
themselves in wood and then encase the wood in diamond — we’ve found a couple dozen of these
trinkets.”

“That’s all? Diamond coated wood trinkets?”

“Things lost on a beach or in a wood, father. We haven’t found a mother shell, a hive, or anything like it.
We should if you give us time.”

The Hive-Father nodded. Starting a bioforming project now could be premature. “Very well. We can
postpone worldbuilding for a little while. We shall build a space hive out of the outer moon, big enough to
spin so our pressure tubes don’t get weak-walled. You’ll have as many revolutions as you need. Maybe
you’ll find where they went — they couldn’t have just vanished. They had spaceships, spacehives —
why, this system is littered with artifacts going back billions of these revolutions. What could this planet
tell us thatthat doesn’t?”

Eldest Daughter warbled in a display of awe. “They have already told us something; Father, they have
told us we are not alone, three times not alone.”

“But the space junk tells us… did you say three times?”

“There is evidence of yet another people here, true bipeds, before the furry people, when this world was
very young…”

“Amazing, but you seem troubled, Eldest Daughter.”

“An anachronism. We have found a fossilized skeleton, and very advanced artifacts with it in layers
where the furry people have only spears and stones. But tooth marks on the bones match the teeth of the