"Vinge Vernor & William Rupp - Just Peace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Vernor)

Just Peace

Vinge Vernor and William Rupp

In its orbit about Jupiter, an artificial star flickered briefly, its essence oscillating between matter and
energy. The complex disturbance generated by those pulsations spread out from the Solar System—in
violation of several classical theories of simultaneity—at many times the speed of light.

Nineteen light-years away, a receiver on the second planet of the-star delta Pavonis picked the signal out
from the universal static of ultra-wave radiation and…

Chente felt a slight, though abrupt, lurch as gravity fell to New Canadian normal. That was the only sign
that the transmission had been accomplished. The cage’s lights didn’t even flicker.

(“We can’t know, of course, the exact conditions which faced your predecessor. His report is eighteen
months overdue, however, so that we must expect the worst”)

Chente took a deep breath and stood, feeling for the moment exaltation: three times before he had sat in
the transmission cage, and each time he had been disappointed.

(“… Believe you are ready, Chente. What can I say to a man about to travel nineteen light-years in an
instant? For that matter, what will I say to the man who remains behind?”)

The exit was behind his chair. Chente hit the control plate, and the hatch slid silently into the wall. Beyond
was the control cubby of a ramscoop starship. Chente scrambled through the opening and stood in the
small space behind the control saddle. The displays were all computer driven, and rather quaint. Neat
lettering above one of the consoles read: INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES OF
CANADA-the original Canada back on Earth. Chente had spent hundreds of hours working out in a
mock-up of this famous control room, but the real thing was subtly different. Here the air felt completely
dead, sterile. The mock-up on Earth had been occupied by occasional technicians, whereas no one but
Chente’s predecessor had been in this room for more than a century. And it had been more than three
centuries since the robot craft had sailed out of the Solar System.

A monument to empires passed, Chente thought as he slipped onto the saddle.

“Who goes there?” a voice asked in English.

Chente looked at the computer’s video pickup. He had had plenty of practice with a similar think-box on
Earth: the mech was barely sentient, but the best mankind could produce in the old days. Chente’s
superiors had theorized that after three hundred twenty years such a brain would be more than a little
irrational. The human responded Carefully, “Vicente Quintero y Jualeiro, agent of the Canadian
Hegemony.” He placed his ID before the pickup. Of course it was a fake—the Canadian Hegemony had
ceased to exist one hundred years earlier. But the computer probably wouldn’t accept any more recent
authority.

“I have already received Vicente Quintero y Jualeiro.”

It really is senile, thought Chente. “That is so. But another copy of Quintero remains on Earth, and was
used for this latest transmission.”