"Allen, Roger MacBride - Chronicles of Solace 3 - Shores of Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Roger Macbride)

УExcuse me, Dr. Ashdin,Ф said Dixon Phelby. УBefore you begin, I have a question regarding one point in the background report. If BaskawТs work was suppressed hundreds of years ago, why wasnТt DeSilvo stopped from using it when he started talking up the terraforming of Solace?Ф

УI think I can answer that,Ф said Koffield. УIt seems as if it was my old outfit, the Chronologic Patrol, that did a lot of the suppressing. Five or six hundred years is a long time for an institution to remember a certain thing. More than likely, they simply lost track of what they had suppressed, and failed to monitor properly for a fresh outbreak of the same idea. Once an idea gets past them, and there is public knowledge of something they want to have stopped, itТs too late. The genie is out of the bottle and canТt be stuffed back in. By the very act of successfully making BaskawТs ideas public, DeSilvo had defeated them.Ф

УAnd СsuppressТ doesnТt necessarily mean Сwipe outТ or Сerase,Т Ф said Norla Chandray. УIt can mean Сslow downТ or Сdelay.Т After all, they did manage to keep BaskawТs ideas from getting out for several centuries. We saw lots of things in the Dark Museum that had been suppressed five hundred years ago, but are now in common use. What happened to BaskawТs work is just more of the same.Ф

УDoes that satisfy you on that point, Mr. Phelby?Ф Ashdin asked.

УYes, pretty much. Please forgive the interruption.Ф

УNot at all,Ф Ashdin replied. УIt was a valid point. Now then.Ф She paused and looked about the room. УI will begin by touching on certain events after the horrific Second Battle of Circum Central. After surviving that disaster, and a journey of tremendous hardship, Captain Koffield got his ship home. However, because his ship could no longer use the destroyed timeshaft wormhole, he and his crew arrived home eight decades into their own future. TheUpholder and all aboard her were home, and yet marooned, trapped in their own future, prevented from returning by the very laws they had enforced.Ф

Something in her shifted as she began to speak. She stood taller, her voice became louder and stronger, taking on the tones of an academic addressing her classroom. No longer a refugee-scholar wandering the starlanes, she had become a university professor again, dispassionate, and yet impassioned, speaking with the confidence of one who had mastered her materialЧand wanted her class to understand that she was planning a most challenging final exam.

УKoffield had followed his orders and done everything he was supposed to do, and done it splendidly. He had protected the past against an assault from the future. His superiors promoted him, decorated himЧand put him up on a very high shelf. The political climate made it impossible for him to command another ship. Officially, he was a hero. Realistically, his career was over.Ф

Koffield knew that the others in the room were looking at him, but he kept his gaze fixed on Ashdin, who addressed the gathering as impersonally as if he and DeSilvo were long dead rather than in the room, close enough for her to touch. But what was he supposed to do? Burst into tears? It was no particular effort to keep his face impassive.

УThe shelf they put him up on was a meaningless and vaguely defined assignment to the Grand Library. In the eighty years that had passed since his departure, the terraforming of Solace had been declared completeЧand final collapse of Glister hadnot occurred.

УBoth of these events were significant to another man then resident in the Grand Library habitatЧDr. Oskar DeSilvo.

УI wish to put his actions at the Grand Library in broader moral context. To do so, we must first turn to what DeSilvoТs fleet of ships did when they arrived in the Glister system. The three surviving FTL craft were programmed to rendezvous with the slowboat fleet, and this they did. They transferred their cargoes and their datastores, and configured themselves for the final assault on Circum Central. Each of the three FTL craft took a pair of attack drones aboard, flew them to the vicinity of Circum Central, released them, then departed before the attack even began. They returned to the slowboat fleet, then about a hundred astronomical units outside the Glister system.

УEven from that vantage point, it was plain that Glister had not yet collapsed. Though his contingency planning had not been all it could have been in other ways, at least DeSilvo had allowed for the possibilities that his eighty-year projection might be inaccurate. In such a circumstance, the fleet was programmed to put itself in a long, slow orbit of the planet, tens of billions of kilometers out from the orbit of Glister itself, and wait for the inevitableЧvultures circling in the darkness, waiting for the victim to expire.

УLike all good scavengers, DeSilvoТs ships didnТt hesitate to hurry the victim along just a bit by wrecking the wormhole and making transit to Glister far more difficult. Consider: The slowboats were programmed to deal with the contingency of Glister still being populated. They simply went into a distant parking orbit. But the FTL ships, part of the same fleet, faced with the same contingency,went back and wrecked the wormhole anyway . I should also note that DeSilvo had enough confidence in his prediction of GlisterТs collapse to create the whole huge project I have described. Butnever once did he make any effort to warn the Glisterns . All his efforts were engaged in a plan to take advantage of the catastropheТs aftermath.

УLet us turn to the other eventЧDeSilvoТs encounter with Koffield at the Grand Library. Here too, I believe, is an insight into DeSilvoТs mind. Four ships were utterly destroyed at Circum Central, and one other damaged beyond repair. Thousands were either dead already, or in peril of their lives because the relief supplies were lost. All that, thanks to DeSilvoТs actions, actions for which he allowed Koffield to be blamed. But all that was far away, remote, far from DeSilvoТs personal experience. He made no effort of any kind to make restitution or to compensate for any of the losses he had caused.

УBut hesaw Koffield, face-to-face, at a cocktail party. Hesaw the man he had injured, and the insult and humiliation that Koffield suffered. I think Admiral Koffield would be the first to agree that his own emotional distress was the least of the injuries caused by DeSilvoТs actions. But the difference was this: DeSilvowitnessed that distress. He tried to make amends, even if the amends were ludicrously inadequate. Later, as we shall see, DeSilvo went to a great deal of trouble to cause Koffield harm once againЧafter Koffield was safely out of the way,where DeSilvo could not see or hear him. Later still, DeSilvo arranged for a way to confess his crimes to Koffield from light-years away.

УThis fits a pattern of DeSilvo hiding away, keeping himself removed, acting at a distance. He is capable of inflicting terrible harm on others, so long as they are far awayЧbut he cannot bear to see suffering he has caused, no matter how slight.

УIn any event, DeSilvo met Koffield and took misplaced pity on a man who needed no pity at all. DeSilvo then made another of the greatest mistakes of his career. He offered Koffield a chance to work in the DeSilvo Institute, where they were preparing a historyЧactually, more of a DeSilvo hagiographyЧof the Solacian terraforming project. This simple act was DeSilvoТs undoing.

УWhile working at the DeSilvo Institute, Koffield discovered a reference to BaskawТs work, then discovered that the works themselves had been erased. He tracked down surviving copies of the text. He studied them in detail and realized that they proved, very clearly, that Solace would fail in a manner similar to GlisterТs failure. He put a rush message, containing his preliminary results, aboard theChrononaut VI, the next ship outbound to Solace, then spent several frantic weeks refining and expanding his work. Meantime, he booked passage aboard theDom Pedro IV, bound for Solace. He planned to deliver a warning in person.

УKoffield studied BaskawТs antique mathematics and made a terrifying discovery: It was not merely Solace that would fail.The problem was systemic to all terraforming procedures: The faster a world is terraformed, the faster it will fail.All the terraformed worldsЧwhich is to say, every inhabited world but EarthЧwould, eventually, fail.

УBut DeSilvo discovered what Admiral Koffield was doing. Telling himself that he was acting to prevent needless panic on Solace, he sabotaged theDom Pedro IV, reprogramming its navigation system to travel direct to Solace without any use of timeshaft wormholes. In effect, he converted theDom Pedro IV into an interstellar slowboat. As a result of this, the crew was kept in cryogenic sleep nearly five decades longer than intended in the flight plan. Two crew members died as a direct resultЧand, of course, the ship and shipТs company were suddenly stranded one hundred and twenty-seven years in their own future. Thus, DeSilvo had time-stranded Koffield twice, for a total of more than two hundred years.

УBy then, of course, KoffieldТs warning was far too late. The rush message he had sent aboard theChrononaut VI had been read and ignored, and the disappearance of theDom Pedro IV had become a minor local legend. The story was barely remembered nearly thirteen decades after the fact.

УIn the meantime, DeSilvo was busy being dead againЧa favorite refuge for him. During the time Koffield was still doing his research at the Grand Library, DeSilvo entered temporal confinement while his medical staff grew a new heart for him.

УAfter he was revived, he did not focus on BaskawТs work, and, I suspect, found many reasons to do anything, everything, but. It was not until years later that he began to reconsider his actions. It was something close to ten years after the departure of the sabotagedDom Pedro IV before DeSilvo finally looked once again at BaskawТs work and applied modern mathematics and analysis to it. He reached the conclusions that Baskaw had been right when she warned that a Solace-style terraforming was inherently unstable, and that KoffieldТs warning had been legitimate. However, DeSilvo convinced himself that it was already too late to warn Solace, that to do so would do more harm than good.Ф

Wandella Ashdin paused a moment and looked about the room. УSo far, my account has mainly been a cataloging of what Dr. DeSilvo didwrong . Now we must come to what he didright . He acted hesitantly, cautiously, and made sure to insulate himself from consequences as much as possible. But, in all justice, Dr. DeSilvo had the courage to see that his past projections had been spectacularly wrong. It would be rash indeed to have faith in further predictions without some testing of his methods, comparing predictions against interim resultsЧand it could take decades to gather that data.