"Carter, Raphael - The Fortunate Fall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Carter Raphael)

"Keishi, this isn't funny."
"I'm trying to protect you. Stealth technology, remember? You're shining like a lighthouse; half of grayspace can see you."
"There's nothing there to see me."
"Contrast, News One, contrast. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there."
When I protested again, she said impatiently: "Here, look!" and folded a layer of herself over my eyes. All at once the space around us, which had been a field of undistinguished neurodes, took on odor, taste, and texture. I felt tremblings, tramplings, stirrings round me. It was like the bottom of the ocean, where strange cave-jawed fish, impossible in light, are nourished, and pearl and weed have been developing for years, unseen of man. I saw a shark sniff Keishi's tendrils, turn bronze in fear, and scull away; and in the distance some lopsided creature spasmed, drowning, tangled in a knot of fishing line.
"You could have shown me this before you did it," I said, but so halfheartedly she didn't bother to reply. Instead she moved forward, instantly attaining an impossible velocity. I was frightened at first, but then began to lose myself to the experience. I swept past sharks and spiders, and rocketed through tangler webs, invulnerable because I was armored in her; so that I began to dread the thought that we would soon reach Voskresenye, and she would have to stop.
We passed a border between computers. I couldn't see it, but I felt it slow us down, like breaking through a sheet of paper. "This is Whisper," she said. "My hearth." It looked just like the rest of grayspace; yet, somehow, the confidence was comforting. "We'll just be going through one corner of it, though--yes, here."
Ahead of us, sharks were moving in slow motion.
"Oh, devil take it! I thought Swazi would be the fastest way-- it's a Dahlak--but it's overloaded. Some idiot must be compiling an AI. Well, it's still quicker than backtracking."
We passed through into the slower hearth. Our thoughts didn't slow down; the speed of neural nets isn't affected by load in other parts of the system. But our motion ground to a crawl.
There was no sense trying to look ahead of us--everything there would be as slow as we were--so I looked behind us, where, things would be faster. But Whisper was as black as night. "Did you take away that new interface?" I said.
"No, it's still there."
"Then why am I blind?"
"The regulators are way backlogged on 'see' commands," she said.
"That never used to happen. Motion would get slow, but you could always see."
"That was back when most abos were still blind, so demand for sight was low. Now almost everything has vision, and the rules committee won't increase the regulator standards. Just thank God you weren't here ten years ago, when the abos were collecting eyes like kids collect marbles. One argus could bring a whole hearth to its knees. God, I'm glad they're extinct. --Burst your eyes, Swazi, if you can't keep your grayspace running right, then give it the hell away. Fucking public hearth admins...." She crawled and fumed, mostly in Sapir.
The sharks back in Whisper were starting to fade into view, their movements fast and jerky, like bad time-lapse. One or two dipped into Swazi, tempted by slow-moving prey, but most kept their distance. The abos know you can't compare speeds across the boundary between computers. Gradually, they were dispersing.
Then as the sharks became brighter, I saw that some of them were not just pacing at the border. Some had their mouths stuck into Swazi, and were spinning out great woven sheets of neurodes, larger than a tangler's web.
"What are they doing?" I asked.
"That's right," Keishi said, "you don't know about webfish either. They're a convertible shark that takes advantage of slowdowns. They stay at the border, where the vision is still fast, and send out sticky strands one neurode wide. Since the strands are so small, they move faster than everything else. And when the slowdown's over, they reel in their catches. It's sort of a brainless strategy, but it works. That's why arguses had so many eyes, too-- they'd deliberately backlog the regulators until everyone was equally blind, and then they'd fish by touch."
"What happened to them?"
"The hearth admins screamed about the overloads, so the rules committee decided to limit the number of vision calls per abo. The arguses lost all their eyes, but they developed a symbiosis with these huge clouds of aphids that each had one eye, and those were even better at slowing a system down than the argus had been. Finally some bright hacker cooked up a program called Millipede, that would run around faster and faster the less it could see, so that no matter what happened, motion was always backlogged worse than vision. That made the argus strategy obsolete. Made huge traffic jams, too, until the ecosystems all reorganized to cope with it. --Thank God, here, this is Veles."
We broke through another membrane, and Keishi began to pick up speed.
"Just in time, too," she said. "Swazi is about to freeze up. We'd have had to unplug and start over."
As we moved away I saw Swazi behind us begin to turn silver. Swazi had been unable to maintain its part of grayspace, and, finding no one to take it over, was storing it all on a moistdisk, frozen in time.
A boom of sound disturbed my sightseeing. I looked forward. Some long, lithe creature, like an eel, was swimming for its life, with an immense shark behind it. It jumped over us, booming; the shark followed, close enough to touch. At the last instant, the eel ducked into Swazi and was silvered. The shark tried to follow it in, but bounced off. Pacing in Veles, it fretted and fumed, like a cartoon lawman stopped by a painted border.
"Oh, clever thing!" Keishi said. "Beautifully timed!"
"What good does that do it?" I asked. "Eventually that part of grayspace will be reactivated. If Swazi can't find time to run it, someone else will."
"Yes, but the eel will still have its momentum and the shark won't," Keishi said. "Besides, by then the shark may have lost interest." Then she was silent for a long time. I was about to ask another question when she said thoughtfully: "Although, I don't know, some sharks are damned persistent." She slowed a little, as if she might go back to chase the shark away. But she shook the impulse off, and we swam on through Veles.
"This is nice," I said. "The water--I mean, grayspace is clear here. No weeds, no debris."
"Veles is reliable. They've held on to this section of grayspace for weeks without a serious slowdown. So the gazehounds and sharks keep things pretty clean. Yes, it's nice. Nice if you're armored."
A school of spheres came toward us from above, enveloped us, and matched our pace. Then they turned silvery, reflecting us. It was like seeing your image in a thousand hand-mirrors.
"What are those?" I said.
"Doppelgangers. They won't hurt you, they'll just imitate you."
"Like mirror-fish?"
"Not really. Mirror-fish just imitated for camouflage. Dopplers do it to learn better algorithms, to take back to their queen. They won't get much from us, though--we're optimized for a different universe."
"I thought that kind of imitation was what shielding was meant to prevent. Algorithmic quarantine, and all that. You know, 'Imagine the destruction of native culture that would ensue if you dropped a radio on some unsuspecting tribe of Bushmen--' "
"Oh, that's an excuse. Bushmen, my ass. They only said that to piss off the Africans. If you dropped a radio on a traditional village, they'd bloody well use it to grind flour--they'd see it in a way appropriate to their world. No abo's going to duplicate a human; we're sloppy and inefficient, by their standards. The Weavers made all that up to keep people out of grayspace, because they were afraid grayspace would be impossible to control. But it didn't work out that way. As you can see, right up ahead."
The dopplers had gone; I saw nothing. "Where?"
"Dead ahead. Do you see her?"
"Who?"
"Look carefully--there." She made an arrow in my visual field to point it out to me: a barely visible disturbance in the neurodes, moving slowly, like the shadow of a hawk against the ground.
"What is it?" I said.
"Weaver."
"Why are we staying here? Why aren't we running?"
"Stay calm, News One. It's just a tendril. She can't see us at this distance."
"Why risk it?" I said. "Let's just go."
"Sit tight a minute," she said, creeping toward it. "I want to see the rest of her."
"Keishi!"
"Hold on." And we were moving again, twice as fast as before. Beneath us was a vein of shadow that gradually widened and silvered, a creek becoming a river. Then suddenly it was a delta, and an ocean, and we were rocketing up away from it, until we could see all its twining tendrils and its spinning core. It looked like something you might see on the slide of a microscope; and then again it looked like a galaxy, something impossibly vast. I felt a rush of vertigo--a fear that I had lost myself, that I would never return to my body. I had to carefully concentrate out of the Net, and focus on the slow inflation of my lungs, to prove to myself I was still real.