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

УHe thought long and hard about how best to make use of those decades and how best to maintain, expand, and finally make use of the tremendous resources that he still controlled.

УSo, at last, he began to make substantive moves, to do more than pour a token thimbleful of water on the forest fire he had so carelessly ignited.

УIt seems highly likely that this was the first time he sat down and read BaskawТs fourth, and, so far as we are aware, final work, simply entitledContraction. This was the book he found in the Dark Museum, one that Anton Koffield later discovered as well.

УThe contraction of the title is, of course, the contraction of interstellar civilization, the inevitable withdrawal back toward the Solar System and Earth, as the terraformed planets fail, one by one.

УDr. DeSilvo began to run increasingly more detailed and sophisticated simulations of the fates of the various worlds and their interactions with each other. He modeled the effects of back-migration, economic destabilization, population pressure, and the psychological effect on the population as the knowledge of the coming collapse spreads. He also applied terraform modeling to study biological contamination.

УThe results of his simulations were badЧindeed they could hardly be worse. Once his data and models were reasonably refined, he discovered that every test run ended the same way: not with the Earth as the last surviving world after the Interstellar Contraction was complete, but with Earth overwhelmed by population spikes of incoming refugees, political upheaval, and perhaps war, and, worst of all, by biological back-contamination and crossbreeding. Plagues sweep the planet. Hybrid microbes, viruses, molds, spores, and worse infest everything, eat everything, choke off food supplies for native species. By the end of every run, humanityЧindeed all vertebrate speciesЧare extinct. Contraction goes as far as it can, all the way down to zero.

УThis was the data he could not bring himself to believe, the predictions he could not trust after all his other predictions had failed.

УHe suddenly found himself in a position to answer a question he hadnТt thought to ask himself for decades, perhaps centuries.Why were certain inventions suppressed? The Chronologic PatrolТs core task, after all, was to protect the past from the future, to prevent any form of time travel that might threaten causality. The Dark Museum should have been full of machines and devices related in some way to time travel; inventions that might threaten casuality. But many, if not most, of the suppressed inventions were related to star travel and terraforming.

УDr. DeSilvo suddenly saw the Chronologic PatrolТs technology suppression policy had been aimed at slowing, and, if possible, stopping, any improvements in interstellar travel that would make going from one star system to another too cheap, too fast, or too easy.

УHe studied the cultures of Earth looking for clues, looking for patternsЧand finding them.

УHe saw ways of doing things, attitudes, traditions, that were enshrined in law, habit, and custom. He saw infrastructureЧempty roads, unused power service, overbuilt food production systems, transportation networks with capacity for ten times the traffic, half-vacant cities with the vacant places carefully maintained.

УHe saw population and family policies that resulted in a steady decline in the population long after it had dropped below the calculated СoptimumТ range. He saw governments and other institutions that placed tremendous reliance on artificial intelligence systems that had been installed and programmed centuries beforeЧArtInts fully capable of working, of guiding and shaping subtleties of policy, and even of tradition, decade after decade, without losing interest, without changing their minds.

УIn short, he saw that Earth had, for centuries, been quietly preparing herself for an influx of refugees. He saw that the Chronologic Patrol had likewise been suppressing advances in terraforming and discouraging new projects. In that they had been completely successful: No new terraforming projects had been started since Solace. Terraforming was turning into a historical science, an activity no longer performed. The logic behind this was plain: The fewer planets that were remade, the fewer planets that would inevitably collapse.

УIn short, slowing and preventing expansion, and preparing for eventual collapse and contraction, were the hidden long-term policies of the Chronologic Patrol and of Earth.

УBut DeSilvoТs simulations showed that even with all of these preparations factored in, the ecology of Earth would still failЧa bit later, and a bit more slowly, perhaps, but just as completely. It seemed unlikely to him that Earth and the CP would focus so much of their time and energy toward the far-off goal of keeping one last dying world alive for an extra hundred years.

УBut, perhaps that was too narrow a view. If the best possible outcome was to keep the race alive an extra century, to allow two or three more generations a chance to live, to let perhaps billions live and love and think and feel, to stave off, even for just a little while, the prospect of an Earth covered in a dreary, malevolent crust of mold and matted algaeЧno, that was very much worth the effort.

УOr perhapsЧperhapsЧthere was some other truly long-term goal Earth and the CP were working toward, something that would take so long that keeping Earth alive a year, or even a day, longer, might tilt the balance. Or perhaps DeSilvoТs simulations were inherently flawedЧan error he worked desperately to find, but could not.

УNone of these answers were really plausible or satisfactory. So why were Earth and the CP merely working to prepare Earth to accept a massive influx of refugees and slowing outward expansion? Why were they following a policy of contraction management?

УClearly, someone must have performed some sort of projection or analysis well before the policy of contraction management was established. Just as clearly, the policy had been in place for centuries. Therefore, their projections must have been done using the mathematical and simulation tools of that day.

УBased on his examination of the models, data, and predictive tools they would most likely have used, it was all but certain that the scholars who had done the original work had stretched their tools too far. The odds were excellent that they had not been able to make a sufficiently long-range forecast, or one that was reliably accurate. Their work would have failed to predict EarthТs collapseЧor might even have made the positiveЧthough falseЧprediction that Earth would survive.

УIt was decision-makers informed by these flawed forecasts who had set policyЧand programmed the ArtInts to keep following that policy, long after their human masters and clients had likely forgotten the matter altogether. That is one danger of suppressing important knowledgeЧrestrict it too completely, and the odds increase to near certainty that the knowledge will be lost altogether.

УBut all Dr. DeSilvo knew for sure was that he did not know for sure. There seemed no doubt that all the other worlds would, sooner or later, fail. And there seemed at least a strong possibility, perhaps a high probability, that Earth herself would die, probably somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred years from now.

УThere was no way to act publicly, directly. If he called a press conference and announced his findings, at best he would simply not be believed. Worse, he would likely be killed, or locked up for good, or wind up with his mind СadjustedТ in some way. Nor could he have really blamed the authorities for doing so. If the collapse was inevitable, speaking of it publicly could only produce panic and might even hasten the end, for example by inspiring people to back-migrate sooner rather than later. Besides, he could not even be sure of his own conclusions. He did not wish to cry wolf.

УThere was also the small matter of the impending collapse of Solace. There could be little argument that he, Oskar DeSilvo, was directly responsible for that. On a smaller scale, he had to make some sort of amends to Anton Koffield, and to the others he had wronged.

УDr. DeSilvo decided to deal with the situation he facedЧa situation largely of his own making. It would take decades for him to be able to confirm even the beginning of the trend lines his simulations predicted. TheDom Pedro IV would arrive at its destination in ten-plus decades. He decided to let that be the baseline for his data collectors.