"Williamson,_Jack_-_The_Ultimate_Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

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The Ultimate Earth
by Jack Williamson
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Copyright (c)2000 by Jack Williamson
First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Dec. 2000

Fictionwise
www.fictionwise.com

Science Fiction
Hugo Award Nominee

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*1.*
He loved Uncle Pen. The name he gave us was too hard for us to say, and we made it Sandor Pen. As early as we could understand, the robots had told us that we were clones, created to watch the skies for danger and rescue Earth from any harm. They had kept us busy with our lessons and our chores and our workouts in the big centrifuge, but life in our little burrow left us little else to do. His visits were our best excitement.
He never told us when he was coming. We used to watch for him, looking from the high dome on the Tycho rim, down across the field of Moondust the digging machines had leveled. Standing huge on the edge of it, they were metal monsters out of space, casting long black shadows across the gray waste of rocks and dust and crater pits.
His visit on our seventh birthday was a wonderful surprise. Tanya saw him landing and called us up to the dome. His ship was a bright teardrop, shining in the black shadow of a gigantic metal insect. He jumped out of it in a sleek silvery suit that fitted like his skin. We waited inside the airlock to watch him peel it off. He was a small lean man, who looked graceful as a girl but still very strong. Even his body was exciting to see, though Dian ran and hid because he looked so strange.
Naked, his body had a light tan that darkened in the sunlit dome and faded fast when he went below. His face was a narrow heart-shape, his golden eyes enormous. Instead of hair like ours, his head was capped with sleek, red-brown fur. He needed no clothing, he told us, because his sex organs were internal.
He called Dian when he missed her, and she crept back to share the gifts he had brought from Earth. There were sweet fruits we had never tasted, strange toys, stranger games that he had to show us how to play. For Tanya and Dian there were dolls that sang strange songs in voices we couldn't understand and played loud music on tiny instruments we had never heard.
The best part was just the visit with him in the dome. Pepe and Casey had eager questions about life on the new Earth. Were there cities? Wild animals? Alien creatures? Did people live in houses, or underground in tunnels like ours? What did he do for a living? Did he have a wife? Children like us?
He wouldn't tell us much. Earth, he said, had changed since our parents knew it. It was now so different that he wouldn't know where to begin, but he let us take turns looking at it through the big telescope. Later, he promised, if he could find space gear to fit us, he would take us up to orbit the Moon and loop toward it for a closer look. Now, however, he was working to learn all he could about the old Earth, the way it had been ages ago, before the great impacts.
He showed it to us in the holo tanks and the brittle old paper books, the way it was with white ice caps over the poles and bare brown deserts on the continents. Terraformed, the new Earth had no deserts and no ice. Under the bright cloud spirals, the land was green where the sun struck it, all the way over the poles. It looked so wonderful that Casey and Pepe begged him to take us back with him to let us see it for ourselves.
"I'm sorry." He shook his neat, fur-crowned head. "Terribly sorry, but you can't even think of a trip to Earth."
We were looking from the dome. Earth stood high in the black north, where it always stood. Low in the west, the slow Sun blazed hot on the new mountains the machines had piled up around the spaceport, and filled the craters with ink.
Dian had learned by now to trust him. She sat on his knee, gazing up in adoration at his quirky face. Tanya stood behind him, playing a little game. She held her hand against his back to bleach the golden tan, and took it away to watch the Sun erase the print.
Looking hurt, Casey asked why we couldn't think of a trip to Earth.
"You aren't like me." That was very true. Casey has a wide black face with narrow Chinese eyes and straight black hair. "And you belong right here."
"I don't look like anybody." Casey shrugged. "Or belong to you."
"Of course you don't." Uncle Pen was gently patient. "But you do belong to the station and your great mission." He looked at me. "Remind him, Dunk."
My clone father was Duncan Yarrow. The master computer that runs the station often spoke with his holo voice. He had told us how we had been cloned again and again from the tissue cells left frozen in the cryostat.
"Sir, that's true." I felt a little afraid of Uncle Pen, but proud of all the station had done. "My holo father has told us how the big impacts killed Earth and killed it again. We have always brought it back to life." My throat felt dry. I had to gulp, but I went on. "If Earth's alive now, that's because of us."
"True. Very true." He nodded, with an odd little smile. "But perhaps you don't know that your little Moon has suffered a heavy impact of his own. If you are alive today, you owe your lives to me."
"To you?" We all stared at him, but Casey was nodding. "To you and the digging machines? I've watched them and wondered what they were digging for. When did that object hit the Moon?"
_"Quien sabe?"_ He shrugged at Pepe, imitating the gesture and the voice Pepe had learned from his holo father. "It was long ago. Perhaps a hundred thousand years, perhaps a million. I haven't found a clue."
"The object?" Pepe frowned. "Something hit the station?"
"A narrow miss." Uncle Pen nodded at the great dark pit in the crater rim just west of us. "The ejecta smashed the dome and buried everything. The station was lost and almost forgotten. Only a myth till I happened on it."
"The diggers?" Casey turned to stare down at the landing field where Uncle Pen had left his flyer in the shadows of those great machines and the mountains they had built. "How did you know where to dig?"
"The power plant was still running," Uncle Pen said. "Keeping the computer alive. I was able to detect its metal shielding and then its radiation."
"We thank you." Pepe came gravely to shake his hand. "I'm glad to be alive."
"So am I," Casey said. "If I can get to Earth." He saw Uncle Pen beginning to shake his head, and went on quickly, "Tell us what you know about the Earth impacts and how we came down to terraform the Earth and terraform it again when it was killed again."
"I don't know what you did."
"You have showed us the difference we made," Casey said. "The land is all green now, with no deserts or ice."
"Certainly it has been transformed." Nodding, Uncle Pen stopped to smile at Tanya as she left her game with the sun on his back and came to sit crosslegged at his feet. "Whatever you did was ages ago. Our historians are convinced that we've done more ourselves."
"You changed the Earth?" Casey was disappointed and a little doubtful. "How?"