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

TWO

Aboard a lighthugger, interstellar space, 2543

The trouble with the dead, Triumvir Ilia Volyova thought, was that they had no real idea when to
shut up.
She had just boarded the elevator from the bridge, weary after eighteen hours in consultation with
various simulations of once-living figures from the ship's distant past. She had been trying to catch
them out, hoping one or more of them would disclose some revealing fact about the origins of the
cache. It had been gruelling work, not least because some of the older beta-level personae could not
even speak modern Norte, and for some reason the software which ran them was unwilling to do
any translating. Volyova had been chain-smoking for the entire session, trying to get her head
around the grammatical peculiarities of middle Norte, and she was not about to stop filling her
lungs now. In fact, back stiff from the nervous tension of the exchanges, she needed it more than
ever. The elevator's air-conditioning was functioning imperfectly, so it took only a few seconds for
her to veil the interior with smoke.
Volyova hoisted the cuff of her fleece-lined leather jacket and spoke into the bracelet which
wrapped around her bony wrist. 'The Captain's level,' she said, addressing the Nostalgia for Infinity,
which would in turn assign a microscopic aspect of itself to the primitive task of controlling the
elevator. A moment later, the floor plunged away.
'Do you wish musical accompaniment for this transit?'
'No, and as I've had to remind you on approximately one thousand previous occasions, what I
wish is silence. Shut up and let me think.'
She rode the spinal trunk, the four-kilometre-long shaft which threaded the entire length of the
ship. She had boarded somewhere near the nominal top of the shaft (there were only 1050 levels
that she knew of) and was now descending at ten decks a second. The elevator was a glass-walled,
field-suspended box, and occasionally the lining of the trackless shaft turned transparent, allowing
her to judge her location without reference to the elevator's internal map. She was descending
through forests now: tiered gardens of planetary vegetation grown wild with neglect, and dying, for
the UV lamps which had once supplied the forest with sunlight were mostly broken now, and no
one could be bothered repairing them. Below the forests, she ghosted through the high eight
hundreds; vast realms of the ship which had once been at the disposal of the crew, when the crew
numbered thousands. Below 800 the elevator passed through the vast and now immobile armature
which spaced the ship's rotatable habitat and nonrotatable utility sections, and then dropped through
two hundred levels of cryogenic storage bays; sufficient capacity for one hundred thousand sleepers
-- had there been any.
Volyova was now more than a kilometre below her starting point, but the ship's ambient pressure
remained constant, life-support one of the rare systems which still functioned as intended.
Nonetheless some residual instinct told her that ears should be popping with the rush of descent.
'Atrium levels,' said the elevator, accessing a long-redundant record of the ship's prior layout. 'For
your enjoyment and recreation needs.'
'Very droll.'
'I'm sorry?'
'I mean, you'd need a pretty odd definition of recreation. Unless your idea of relaxation happened
to be suiting-up in full vacuum-rated armour and dosing on a bowel-loosening regimen of anti-
radiation therapies. Which doesn't strike me as being particularly pleasurable.'
'I'm sorry?'
'Forget it,' Volyova said, sighing.
For another kilometre she passed through only sparsely pressurised districts. Volyova felt her
weight lessen and knew she was passing the engines -- braced beyond the hull on elegant, swept-