"Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon The Deep (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Vernor)

Days passed. For the evil that was growing in the new machines, each hour was

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 A Fire Upon the Deep


longer than all the time before. Now the newborn was less than an hour from its
great flowering, its safe spread across interstellar spaces.

The local humans could be dispensed with soon. Even now they were an
inconvenience, though an amusing one. Some of them actually thought to escape.
For days they had been packing their children away into coldsleep and putting
them aboard the freighter. "Preparations for departure," was how they described
the move in their planner programs. For days, they had been refitting the frigate --
behind a a mask of transparent lies. Some of the humans understood that what
they had wakened could be the end of them, that it might be the end of their
Straumli Realm. There was precedent for such disasters, stories of races that had
played with fire and had burned for it.

None of them guessed the truth. None of them guessed the honor that had fallen
upon them, that they had changed the future of a thousand million star systems.




The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second was as
long as all the time before. The flowering was so close now, so close. The
dominion of five billion years before would be regained, and this time held. Only
one thing was missing, and that was something quite unconnected with the
humans' schemes. In the archive, deep in the recipes, there should have been a
little bit more. In billions of years, something could be lost. The newborn felt all
its powers of before, in potential ... yet there should be something more,
something it had learned in its fall, or something left by its enemies (if there ever
were such).

Long seconds probing the archives. There were gaps, checksums damaged. Some
of the damage was age....


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 A Fire Upon the Deep


Outside, the container ship and the frigate lifted from the landing field, rising on
silent agravs above the plains of gray on gray, of ruins five billion years old.
Almost half of the humans were aboard those craft. Their escape attempt, so
carefully concealed. The effort had been humored till now: it was not quite time
for the flowering, and the humans were still of some use.

Below the level of supreme consciousness, its paranoid inclinations rampaged