"Charles Stross - Generation Gap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

landing. The flat grey of the strip split by a silver flash, then a contrail of blue-hot oxygen. The
lander zipped past at over 2 EXP 3 kilometres per hour, decelerating fast. Left molten tracks
drying on the basalt.
They shared a Moment of meditation, observing. Then branched. Branched again,
after meal. Mom and Syrinx left, social circuit fizzing, tube to Gagarin on the other side of
Luna. Looked like they'd miss the fun. Jerzy and I subsequently alone in homenode.
He had words. "We should act soon," he said, quietly and urgently; "priority high. Or
do you fancy delaying until someone else springs it?"
"Guess not." I shrugged. "Any concepts?"
"Yes. Get the rest, then act. Simple trick; trip-wire."
"Trip-what?" He explained, my Wisdom concurred, and we did it. Went to get the
gang. The rest was anticlimax.
We gathered on the earthlit plain, seven silvery silhouettes with parasols. Faces
indistinguishable but minds hot; we were bussed, again.
There was a landing every ten minutes on the strip. Kid Inkatha and Hammurabi had
tooled up a robotnik to make monofilament rope. It gleamed blue, flickers running up and
down its extruded length. We waited for next landing, and afterwards crossed the strip.
Pegged it out, taut but held between uneven heights. That way the wheel rims that survived
would be skewed; enough to divert by a few degrees. Interface with dome. Then we sat it out
inside, waiting for big splash, killcounters in place.
Now you cannot convince me that kiddies are human. Their response pattern is alien.
Their appearance often grotesque. Their thought patterns are non-parametric. Their logic is a
virus. A virus infecting us as we age, until we are crippled by memories and Wisdom external
and internal. I do not see that their lives matter. Ours do, but we are the future. That's why we
needed to know that genocide theory works; subsequently apply it to rival groups. That's
causality; kiddies are acausal. A history blockage. Maybe they didn't want to die; but they
needed to.
There was a flicker of yellow fire and a jolt through the ground. Moon, earth stood still
in respect as the dome imploded. We'd missed a point; catastrophe theory. Dome was a
geodesic structure. Damage resulted in chain reaction turning it to gravel.
I think I saw the lander, embedded in a halo of light. But maybe not. We sheltered
under a homenode as roof rained gently down. Our suits inflated as air curtain blew away in
silence. We waited and watched, then walked.
I saw a kiddie. It was genderized as a he, but large elements were ambiguous. He
squatted and twitched, spraying soil around in agonised figure-infinity patterns until he was
decorticated by a falling diamond the size of my fist. It was the only death I saw; population
density was too low for mass havoc.
A housetree had cramped and iced into a position of agony; around it lay the small,
scattered twists of landpussies, strangely pathetic in the twilight. In death they assumed the
colour of the lunar surface. Later we camped out in the desert, saw no more corpses,
huddled together for emotional warmth. I hoped our deathcount program could verify the
consequences of our initiation. In the pale earthglow it seemed almost futile; a waste of time.
Erase and restart. Only ...
This node has no door. I await sentence. Trial by statistical probability of neurones
firing in order to precipitate havoc; jury is my own brain. Probable sentence is centerograde
amnesia; no new memories recorded after crushing sense of guilt delivered. We live in an
eternal present, huddled like ghosts against the vapour pressure of the past.
They probably cannot read my texts. I can expect no mercy for my identity. The dead
are all dead, remain so, resurrection improbable due to cost. Many of them sheltered death-
lust, but still considered murdered by courts. Theory worked, by the way. Kill-level