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

For my Grandparents.




“The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great
machine.”
SIR JAMES
JEANS




PROLOGUE



She stands alone at the jetty’s end, watching the sky. In the moonlight, the
planked boarding of the jetty is a shimmering silver-blue ribbon reaching
back to shore. The sea is ink-black, lapping calmly against the jetty’s
supports. Across the bay, out towards the western horizon, there are
patches of luminosity: smudges of twinkling pastel-green, as if a fleet of
galleons has gone down with all lights ablaze.
She is clothed, if that is the word, in a white cloud of mechanical
butterflies. She urges them to draw closer, their wings meshing tight. They
form themselves into a kind of armour. It is not that she is cold—the
evening breeze is warm and freighted with the faint, exotic tang of distant
islands—but that she feels vulnerable, sensing the scrutiny of something
vaster and older than she. Had she arrived a month earlier, when there
were still tens of thousands of people on this planet, she doubted that the
sea would have paid her this much attention. But the islands are all
abandoned now, save for a handful of stubborn laggards, or newly arrived
latecomers like herself. She is something new here—or, rather, something
that has been away for a great while—and her chemical signal is
awakening the sea. The smudges of light across the bay have appeared
since her descent. It is not coincidence.
After all this time, the sea still remembers her.
“We should go now,” her protector calls, his voice reaching her from the
black wedge of land where he waits, leaning impatiently on his stick. “It
isn’t safe, now that they’ve stopped shepherding the ring.”
The ring, yes: she sees it now, bisecting the sky like an exaggerated,
heavy-handed rendition of the Milky Way. It spangles and glimmers:
countless flinty chips of rubble catching the light from the closer sun.
When she arrived, the planetary authorities were still maintaining it:
every few minutes or so, she would see the pink glint of a steering rocket
as one of the drones boosted the orbit of a piece of debris, keeping it from
grazing the planet’s atmosphere and falling into the sea. She understood
that the locals made wishes on the glints. They were no more superstitious