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

sense their agreement with Awaiter.
"Help them? How?" my sub-voice asks. "Our last repair and replication units fell apart
shortly after the Final Battle. We had no way of knowing humans had evolved until the
creatures themselves invented radio.
"And then it was too late! Their first transmissions are already propagating, unrecallable,
into a deadly galaxy. If there are destroyers around in this region of space, the humans are
already lost!
"Why worry the poor creatures, then? Let them enjoy their peace. Warning them will
accomplish nothing."
Oh, I am good! This little artificial voice argues as well as I did long ago, staving off
abrupt action by my impatient peers.
Greeter glides into the network. I feel his cool electron flux, eloquent as usual.
"I agree with Seeker," he states surprisingly. "The creatures do not need to be told about
their danger. They are already figuring it out for themselves."
Now this does interest me. I sweep my subpersona aside and extend a tendril of my Very
Self into the network. None of the others even notice the shift.
"What makes you believe this?" I ask Greeter.
Greeter indicates our array of receivers salvaged from ancient derelicts. "We're
intercepting what the humans say to each other as they explore this asteroid belt," he says.
"One human, in particular, appears on the verge of understanding what happened here, long
ago."
Greeter's tone of smugness must have been borrowed from Earthly television shows. But
that is understandable. Greeter's makers were enthusiasts, who programmed him to love
nothing greater than the simple pleasure of saying hello.
"Show me," I tell him. I am reluctant to hope that the long wait was over at last..

2
Ursula Fleming stared as the asteroid's slow rotation brought ancient, shattered ruins into
view below. "Lord, what a mess," she said, sighing.
She had been five years in the Belt, exploring and salvaging huge alien works, but never
had she beheld such devastation as this.
Only four kilometers away, the hulking asteroid lay nearly black against the starry band of
the Milky Way, glistening here and there in the light of the distant sun. The rock stretched
more than two thousand meters along its greatest axis. Collisions had dented, cracked, and
cratered it severely since it had broken from its parent body more than a billion years ago.
On one side it seemed a fairly typical carbonaceous planetoid, like millions of others
orbiting out here at the outer edge of the Belt. But this changed as the survey ship Hairy
Thunderer orbited around the nameless hunk of rock and frozen gases. The sun's vacuum
brilliance cast long, sharp shadows across the ruined replication yards... jagged, twisted
remnants of a catastrophe that had taken place when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.
"Gavin!" she called over her shoulder. "Come down here! You've got to see this!"
In a minute her partner floated through the overhead hatch, flipping in midair. There was a
faint click as his feet contacted the magnetized floor.
"All right, Urs. What's to see? More murdered babies to dissect and salvage? Or have we
finally found a clue to who their killers were?"
Ursula only gestured toward the viewing port. Her partner moved closer and stared.
Highlights reflected from Gavin's glossy features as the ship's searchlight swept the shattered
scene below.
"Yep," Gavin nodded at last. "Dead babies again. Fleming Salvage and Exploration ought to
make a good price off each little corpse."