"Norman Spinrad - Riding the Torch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

"Don't whine to me, I've never had more."
You laugh a wild maniac howl. "And I've got plenty of company, now."
You are the Wanderer, looking down at the slain Earth, listening to the
bell toll, feeling the dead weight of the mallet in your hand. "So do I,
Dutchman, so do I."
The globe of the Earth transforms itself into another world: a
brown-and-purple planetary continent marbled with veins and lakes of
watery blue. Clad in a heavy spacesuit, you are standing on the surface of
the planet: naked rock on the shore of a clear blue lake, under a violet sky
laced with thin gray clouds like jet contrails. A dozen other suited men are
fanned out across the plain of fractured rock, like ants crawling on a bone
pile.
"Dead," you say. "A corpse-world."
Maniac laughter beside you. "Don't be morbid, Wanderer. Nothing is
dead that was never alive."
You kneel on a patch of furrowed soil cupping a wilted pine seedling in
your hands. The sky above you is steel plating studded with overhead
floodlights, and the massive cylindrical body of the torchtube skewers the
watertank universe of this dirtdigger deck. The whole layout is primitive,
strictly first-generation Trek. Beside you, a young girl in green dirtdigger
shorts and shirt is sitting disconsolately on the synthetic loam, staring at
the curved outer bulkhead of the farm deck.
"I'm going to live and die without ever seeing a sky or walking in a
forest," she says. "What am I doing here? What's all this for?"
"You're keeping the embers of Earth alive," you say in your ancient's
voice. "You're preserving the last surviving forms of organic life. Some day
your children or your children's children will plant these seeds in the living
soil of a new Earth."
"Do you really believe that?" she says earnestly, turning her youthful
strength on you like a sun. "That we'll find a living planet some day?"
"You must believe. If you stop believing, you'll be with us here in this
hell of our own creation. We Earthborn were life's destroyers. Our children
must be life's preservers."
She looks at you with the Wanderer's cold eternal eyes, and her face
withers to a parchment of ancient despair. "For the sake of our
bloodstained souls?" she says, then becomes a young girl once more.
"For the sake of your own, girl, for the sake of your own."
You float weightless inside the huddled circle of the Trek. The circular
formation of ships is a lagoon of light in an endless sea of black
nothingness. Bow-ward of the Trek, the interstellar abyss is hidden behind
a curtain of gauzy brilliance: the hydrogen interface, where the combined
scoopfields of the Trek's fusion torches form a permanent shock wave
against the attenuated interstellar atmosphere. Although the Trek's ships
have already been modified and aligned to form the hydrogen interface,
the ships are still the same converted asteroid freighters that left Sol; this
is no later than Trek Year 150.
But inside the circle of ships, the future is being launched. The Flying
Dutchman, the first torchship to be built entirely on the Trek out of
matter winnowed and transmuted from the interstellar medium, floats in
the space before you, surrounded by a gnat swarm of intership shuttles