"Baxter, Stephen - Raft" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

that's a little heavy? Give the boy a few chores and let it go."
"Let it go?" Hollerbach arched back his head, pale eyes blazing.
Even the Captain, Rees realised, couldn't save him. "Very well. I'll
inform Bob, have the lad's things sent over -"

And Rees found himself trailing after Hollerbach, his world in pieces.
He was allowed to see his mother once. After that he set his face into a
mask and kept it that way, rejecting all Hollerbach's mocking attempts to
make conversation.
The Laboratories were a jumble of oversize huts at the centre of the Raft
- wooden, of course, like the rest of the Raft's buildings. Rees was set
to work at simple chores - cleaning, cooking, laundry - and his misery
deepened at the squalor of the place. The Scientists were mostly
middle-aged, overweight and irritable. Brandishing the bits of string that
denoted their ranking, they moved about their strange tasks and ignored
him.
The shifts passed slowly, but gradually Rees' interest was drawn by the
contents of the rooms he dusted. There were glass jars with tree sap in
various stages of hardening, great ledgers showing the estimated paths of
the stars falling around the Raft, painfully computed schedules for moving
the Raft itself.
He found a brilliant sphere the size of his thumb; around it on silver
wires orbited nine orbs. A plaque on the base said "Solar System". Rees
spent hours watching the painted planets ...
And there was a Library.
For days Rees dusted the surfaces of the great books, averting his eyes
from the spines. "Ship's Log ..." "Technical Report ..."
Finally he pulled down a volume and opened it carefully. The paper was
yellow with age; clouds of dust billowed up from each page.
"So it can read, can it?" Hollerbach grinned, showing chipped teeth.
Rees thumped the book shut. "Of course I can read," he snapped. "And what
I've read is all wrong."
"Oh, yes?" Hollerbach's eyes sparkled behind his spectacles. "And it can
talk, too!"
Rees went on stubbornly: "Yes, it's wrong. According to this, when the
first Crew flew here in their ship -"
"You know the story, surely." Hollerbach took off his spectacles and began
to polish them on a corner of his shirt. Rees tried to interrupt, but
Hollerbach had settled into his stride. "Five hundred years ago a great
warship - chasing some forgotten opponent - blundered through a portal. A
gateway. It left its own universe and arrived here.
"The ship instantly imploded in its own gravity field ... but the Crew
survived. Out of the debris they constructed the Raft, twelve kilometres
wide; they trapped the trees that support us; they salvaged books and
supply machines - and they set up the fragile social order that has kept
us alive to this day."
"Yes," said Rees, "but it says here they found the sky blue, and all the
stars yellow or white. But now the stars are mostly red - even the young
ones - and so's the sky."
"Very observant. But the arrival was generations ago. The nebula - the