"Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space 04 - Absolution Gap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

TWO

Lighthugger Gnostic Ascension, Interstellar Space, 2615




Surgeon-General Grelier strode through the circular green-lit corridors of
the body factory.
 He hummed and whistled, happy in his element, happy to be
surrounded by humming machines and half-formed people. With a shiver
of anticipation he thought about the solar system that lay ahead of them
and the great many things that depended on it. Not necessarily for him, it
was true, but certainly for his rival in the matter of the queen’s affection.
Grelier wondered how she would take another of Quaiche’s failures.
Knowing Queen Jasmina, he did not think she would take it awfully well.
Grelier smiled at that. The odd thing was that for a system on which so
much hung, the place was still nameless; no one had ever bothered with
the remote star and its uninteresting clutch of planets. There had never
been any reason to. There would be an obscure catalogue entry for the
system in the as-trogation database of the Gnostic Ascension, and indeed
of almost every other starship, along with brief notes on the major
characteristics of its sun and worlds, likely hazards and so forth. But these
databases had never been intended for human eyes; they existed only to be
interrogated and updated by other machines as they went about their
silent, swift business executing those shipboard tasks considered too dull
or too difficult for humans. The entry was just a string of binary digits, a
few thousand ones and zeroes. It was a measure of the system’s
unimportance that the entry had only been queried three times in the
entire operational lifetime of the Gnostic Ascension. It had been updated
once.
Grelier knew: he had checked, out of curiosity.
Yet now, perhaps for the first time in history, the system was of more
than passing interest. It still had no name, but now at least the absence of
one had become vaguely troubling, to the point where Queen Jasmina
sounded a trifle more irritated every time she was forced to refer to the
place as “the system ahead” or “the system we are approaching.” But
Grelier knew that she would not deign to give the place a name until it had
proved valuable. And the system’s value was entirely in the hands of the
queen’s fading favourite, Quaiche.
Grelier paused a while near one of the bodies. It was suspended in
translucent support gel behind the green glass of its vivification tank.
Around the base of the tank were rows of nutrient controls like so many
organ stops, some pushed in and some pulled out. The stops controlled the
delicate biochemical environment of the nutrient matrix. Bronze valve
wheels set into the side of the tank adjusted the delivery of bulk chemicals
like water or saline.
Appended to the tank was a log showing the body’s clonal history.