"Scott Westerfeld - Evolution's Darling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westerfeld Scott)

EVOLUTION'S DARLING
by
SCOTT WESTERFELD

Copyright 1999
ISBN 1-56858-149-1

If we can find out those measures, whereby a rational creature . . . may and
ought to govern his opinions and actions, we need not be troubled that some
other things escape our knowledge.

—John Locke

To San Miguel, and those who came.

Prologue

THE MOVEMENTS OF HER EYES

It started on that frozen world, among the stone figures in their almost
suspended animation.
Through her eyes, the irises two salmon moons under a luminous white brow,
like fissures in the world of rules, of logic. The starship's mind watched
through the prism of their wonder, and began to make its change.
She peered at the statue for a solid, unblinking minute. Protesting tears
gathered to blur her vision, but Rathere's gaze did not waver. Another minute,
and a tic tugged at one eye, taking up the steady rhythm of her heartbeat.
She kept watching.
"Ha!" she finally proclaimed. "I saw it move."
"Where?" asked a voice in her head, unconvinced.
Rathere rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, mouth open, awestruck by
the shooting red stars behind her eyelids. Her blinks made up now for the lost
minutes, and she squinted at the dusty town square.
"His foot," she announced, "it moved. But maybe . . . only a centimeter."
The voice made an intimate sound, a soft sigh beside Rathere's ear that did
not quite reject her claim.
"Maybe just a millimeter," Rathere offered. A touch of unsure emphasis hovered
about the last word; she wasn't used to tiny units of measurement, though from
her father's work she understood light-years and metaparsecs well enough.
"In three minutes? Perhaps a micrometer," the voice in her head suggested.
Rathere rolled the word around in her mouth. In response to her questioning
expression, software was invoked, as effortless as reflex. Images appeared
upon the rough stones of the square: a meter-stick, a hundredth of its length
glowing bright red, a detail box showing that hundredth with a hundredth of
its length flashing, yet another detail box . . . completing the six orders of
magnitude between meter and micrometer. Next to the final detail box a
cross-section of human hair floated for scale, as bloated and gnarled as some
blackly diseased tree.
"That small?" she whispered. A slight intake of breath, a softening of her
eyes' focus, a measurable quantity of adrenalin in her bloodstream were all