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

than any of the other planet dwellers she had met, but they understood the
utter fragility of their world—that without the glints there was no future.
It would have cost the authorities nothing to continue shepherding the
ring: the self-repairing drones had been performing the same mindless
task for four hundred years, ever since the resettlement. Turning them off
had been a purely symbolic gesture, designed to encourage the evacuation.
Through the veil of the ring, she sees the other, more distant moon: the
one that wasn’t shattered. Almost no one here had any idea what
happened. She did. She had seen it with her own eyes, albeit from a
distance.
“If we stay…” her protector says.
She turns back, towards the land. “I just need a little time. Then we can
go.”
“I’m worried about someone stealing the ship. I’m worried about the
Nestbuilders.”
She nods, understanding his fears, but still determined to do the thing
that has brought her here.
“The ship will be fine. And the Nestbuilders aren’t anything to worry
about.”
“They seem to be taking a particular interest in us.”
She brushes an errant mechanical butterfly from her brow. “They
always have. They’re just nosy, that’s all.”
“One hour,” he says. “Then I’m leaving you here.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Only one way to find out, isn’t there?”
She smiles, knowing he won’t desert her. But he’s right to be nervous: all
the way in they had been pushing against the grain of evacuation. It was
like swimming upstream, buffeted by the outward flow of countless ships.
By the time they reached orbit, the transit stalks had already been
blockaded: the authorities weren’t allowing anyone to ride them down to
the surface. It had taken bribery and guile to secure passage on a
descending car. They’d had the compartment to themselves, but the whole
thing—so her companion had said—had smelt of fear and panic; human
chemical signals etched into the very fabric of the furniture. She was glad
she didn’t have his acuity with smells. She is frightened enough as it is:
more than she wants him to know. She had been even more frightened
when the Nestbuilders followed her into the system. Their elaborate
spiral-hulled ship—fluted and chambered, vaguely translucent—is one of
the last vessels in orbit. Do they want something of her, or have they just
come to spectate?
She looks out to sea again. It might be her imagination, but the glowing
smudges appear to have increased in number and size; less like a fleet of
galleons below the water now than an entire sunken metropolis. And the
smudges seem to be creeping towards the seaward end of the jetty. The
ocean can taste her: tiny organisms scurry between the air and the sea.
They seep through skin, into blood, into brain.
She wonders how much the sea knows. It must have sensed the
evacuation: felt the departure of so many human minds. It must have
missed the coming and going of swimmers, and the neural information
they carried. It might even have sensed the end of the shepherding