"David Brin - Lungfish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

"Lungfish"


a short story by David Brin
Currently published in The River of Time.
Copyright й 1987, by David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.

1
Awaiter is excited again. She transmits urgently, trying to get my attention.
"Seeker, listen!" Her electronic voice hisses over the ancient cables. "The little living ones
are near, Seeker! Even now they explore this belt of asteroids, picking through the rocks and
ruins. You can hear them as they browse over each new discovery!
"Soon they will find us here! Do you hear me, Seeker? It is time to decide what to do!"
Awaiter's makers were impatient creatures. I wonder that she has lasted so long, out
here in the starry cold.
My own makers were wiser.
"Seeker! Are you listening to me?"
I don't really wish to talk with anyone, so I erect a side-personality -- little more than a
swirling packet of nudged electrons -- to handle her for me. Even if Awaiter discovers the
sham, she might take a hint then and leave me alone.
Or she might grow more insistent. It would be hard to predict without awakening more
dormant circuits than I care to bring into play right now.
"There is no hurry," my artifact tells her soothingly. "The Earth creatures will not get
here for several of their years. Anyway, there is nothing we can do to change matters when
they do arrive. It was all written long ago."
The little swirl of electrons really is very good. It speaks with my own accent, and seems
quite logical, for a simple construct.
"How can you be so complacent!" Awaiter scolds. The cables covering our rocky, icy
worldlet -- our home for so many ages -- reverberate with her electronic exasperation.
"We survivors made you leader, Seeker, because you seemed to understand best what
was happening in the galaxy at large. But now, at last, our waiting is at an end. The biological
creatures will be here soon, and we shall have to act!"
Perhaps Awaiter has tuned in to too much Earth television over the last century or so.
Her whining sounds positively human.
"The Earthlings will find us or they won't," my shadow self answers. "We few survivors
are too feeble to prevent it, even if we wished. What can a shattered band of ancient
machines fear or anticipate in making Contact with such a vigorous young race?"
Indeed, I did not need Awaiter to tell me the humans were coming. My remaining sensors
sample the solar wind and savor the stream of atoms and radicals much as a human might
sniff the breeze. In recent years, the flow from the inner system has carried new scents --
the bright tang of metal ions from space-foundries, and the musty smoke-smell of
deuterium.
The hormones of industry.
And there is this busy modulation of light and radio -- where the spectrum used to carry
only the hot song of the star. All of these are signs of an awakening. Life is emerging from
the little water-womb on the third planet. It is on its way out here.
"Greeter and Emissary want to warn the humans of their danger, and I agree!" Awaiter
insists. "We can help them!"
Our debate has aroused some of the others; I notice new tendrils entering the network.
Watcher and Greeter make their presence felt as little fingers of super-cooled electricity. I