"Peter Watts - Ambassador" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

Ambassador 1

I've never sold a story to Analog. (Truth be told, I've never sold a
story to any of the US magazines.) But this one, according to
Analog editor Stanley Schmidt, "almost made it". It had a
"powerful narrative drive" and "compelling theme". Sadly, ol'
Stan also found the ending "ugly" and "simplistic"; in other words,
just too damn futile (which, to those familiar with my work, is kind
of a familiar refrain). I toyed with the idea of bringing in some
clowns at the end, but I just couldn't get 'em to dance on cue.

“Ambassador” finally showed up in my "Ten Monkeys, Ten
Minutes" anthology, albeit in a somewhat updated and up-tarted
(but every bit as ugly and futile) form. It was my one true foray
into spaceships-and-rayguns science fiction until Blindsight (still
in progress). And in either a clever nod to continuity or a pathetic
recycling of unoriginal ideas, the thematic tagline of this story
shows up in Blindsight as well.




Ambassador
Peter Watts



First Contact was supposed to solve everything.
That was the rumour, anyway: gentle wizards from Epsilon
Eridani were going to save us from the fire and welcome us into a
vast Galactic Siblinghood spanning the Milky Way. Whatever
diseases we'd failed to conquer, they would cure. Whatever
political squabbles we hadn't outgrown, they would resolve. They
were going to fix it all.
They were not supposed to turn me into a hunted animal.
2 Watts

I didn't dwell much on the philosophical implications, at first; I
was too busy running for my life. Zombie streaked headlong into
the universe, slaved to a gibbering onboard infested with static.
Navigation was a joke. Every blind jump I made reduced the
chances of finding my way home by another order of magnitude. I
did it anyway, and repeatedly; any jump I didn't make would kill
me.
Once more out of the breach. Long-range put me somewhere
in the cometary halo of a modest binary. In better times the
computer would have shown me the system's planetary retinue in
an instant; now it would take days to make the necessary
measurements.
Not enough time. I could have fixed my position in a day or so