"Alastair Reynolds - Pushing Ice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

Her name was Chromis Pasqueflower Bowerbird and she had travelled a long way
to make her case. The faint possibility of failure had always been at the back of her
mind, but now that her ship had actually delivered her to the Congressional capital
world, now that she had actually frameshifted to New Far Florence across all those
dizzying light-years, the faint possibility had sharpened into a stomach-churning
conviction that she was about to suffer imminent and chastening defeat. There had
always been people eager to tell her that her proposal was doomed, but for the first
time it occurred to her that they could be right. What she had in mind was, even by
her own admission, a deeply unorthodox suggestion.
“Well, it’s certainly a nice day for it,” said Rudd Indigo Mammatus, joining her on
the balcony, high above the cloud-girdled tiers and gardens of the Congress
building’s foot-slopes.
“Abject humiliation, you mean?”
Rudd shook his head good-naturedly. “It’s the last perfect day of summer. I’ve
checked: tomorrow will be cooler, stormier. Doesn’t that strike you as suitably
auspicious?”
“I’m worried. I think I’m going to make an idiot of myself in there.”
“We’ve all made idiots of ourselves at some point. In this line of work it’s almost
obligatory.”
Chromis and Rudd were politicians, political friends from different constituencies
of the Congress of the Lindblad Ring.
Chromis spoke for a relatively small grouping of settled worlds: a mere one
hundred and thirty planet-class entities, packed into a volume of space only twenty
light-years across.

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Pushing Ice


Rudd’s constituency, located on the edge of the Ring—where it brushed against the
fractious outer worlds of the Loop II Imperium—enveloped a much larger volume
of space but only a third as many planet-class entities. Politically, they had very
little in common, but by the same token they had very little worth squabbling over.
Once every five hundred years, when the representatives were summoned to New
Far Florence, Chromis and Rudd would meet to swap world-weary tales of scandal
and chicanery from their respective constituencies.
Chromis fingered the ring on her right index finger, tracing the interlocking,
hypnotically complex design embossed into its surface. “Do you think they’ll go for
it? It’s been eighteen thousand years, after all. It’s asking a lot of people to think
back that far.”
“The whole point of this little exercise is to dream up something to commemorate
ten thousand years of our glorious Congress,“ Rudd said, with only the slightest
trace of irony. ”If the other representatives can’t get off their fat backsides and
think back another eight thousand years before that, they deserve to have the
reeves set on them.“
“Don’t joke,” Chromis said darkly. “I heard they had to send in the reeves on
Hemlock only four hundred years ago.”
“Messy business, too: by all accounts there were at least a dozen non-recoverable
dead. But I wasn’t joking, Chromis: if they don’t bite, I’ll personally recommend a