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

"Let's see which one she is," Keishi said, and blew out a stream of bubbles.
"Are you insane?"
"Relax. The stimuli are so low-level she'll hardly even notice them. And she couldn't trace them to me if she did. I just want to see which one she goes for."
The bubbles circled the shifting and spiraling Weaver. At length one of her tendrils flicked idly, like a hand absently grasping a teacup, and a bubble disappeared.
"Aha," Keishi said respectfully. "This one sweeps for a brain virus called Parafango. Minor, but not as minor as I thought. --But then, this wouldn't be the original. This virus killed three or four Weavers, before they finally made the nastiest strains extinct."
"Who wrote it?"
"No one, it's indigenous. It's a timid little herbivore that learned to protect itself in grayspace by hiding in a human brain. Perfectly harmless, as long as you're here. But if it gets downloaded into your flesh brain--well, they wiped out the one that trashes the arcuate fasciculus, thank God. So much for your Bushman's radio; do you really think the Weavers could fight abos like that and still worry that we'd invade them?"
Her derision made me nervous, but the Weaver was still grazing unperturbed.
"Have you ever seen one before?" she asked.
"A Weaver? No," I said. And then: "Not that I remember."
"I'm glad you got the chance, then. Isn't she beautiful?"
"Beautiful?" I said scornfully. "Necessary, maybe. I don't want another Army any more than anyone else. But Weavers, beautiful? They scare the hell out of me."
"Beautiful and terrible," she said. "Like a snake, or a tiger."
"Squids and spiders come to mind."
"Oh, don't be so literal. Doesn't she remind you of--damn!" she cried out suddenly. And we were speeding through the Net again, in full flight.
"What happened?"
"She almost saw us," Keishi said, slowing down. "It's okay, she's not pursuing. She was just curious."
"That's what you get for taking risks like that."
She ignored the warning. "This," she said, "is Darkness-at-Noon."
I first saw Voskresenye as a tiny knot of neurodes, about the size of mine but more irregularly shaped, like an apple with some bites out of it. Grouper fish of some kind, not dopplers, were schooling around him. As Keishi circled him at a distance, I saw that the lump of neurodes was thickly cabled to a vast dark bulk that loomed above us, dwarfing even Keishi. It was like a storm-cloud that takes up the whole sky. The eye shrank from it. How the hell did a man that old get wired like that?
"How interesting." The voice came from the little knob of cells I had first seen. "A delegation. Does one address Leviathan, or the seed in his stomach?"
Before I could answer, Keishi said "I was going to ask if you were the blimp, or the ugly dwarf in its gondola."
"Keishi!" I cried out, shocked. But Voskresenye was not offended:
"I expected someone unenhanced, so I extruded something her own size for her to talk to. I hardly expected that she would come riding an elephant."
Keishi swam a little closer toward him, and spoke a stream of static.
What was that? I subvocalized.
"Sapir."
I know it's Sapir, I said irritably. There are only two computer languages that have native human speakers, and KRIOL sounds different. I know Sapir when I hear it; I just never got past the segmentive case. What did you say?
"If you put in your new language chip--"
The audience doesn't want to deal with Sapir any more than I do, I said. Will you just tell me?
"It was a superimposition of several comments involving his sexual preferences, his mother, and his bandwidth."
Keishi, for God's sake, I said. But by that time, she and Voskresenye had already exchanged more words in Sapir than I could hope to count. What's he saying to you?
"Umm, let's just say that only a few years ago it would have been anatomically impossible."
Then Keishi said something that made Voskresenye laugh and turn away.
What? What was that?
"Sorry, no way could I translate," she said. "Some insults just don't make sense unless you can specify a waveform with a single word."
Voskresenye's eyestalks swiveled toward me, and he spoke again.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I don't speak Sapir."
"He asked you to confirm your Netname," Keishi said.
"Oh. Umm, confirm(Maya, News One, camera)," I said, pleased to discover that in grayspace the palatal click for left-paren didn't hurt my mouth. A pattern of colored lights appeared between us.
"Is it safe to say my pass phrase?" I asked Keishi.
"Yes," she said. "I've got you covered."
I had a moment of amusement when I realized she meant this literally. A million kilometers away, my body stirred and whispered: "Give up your past desires, and leave the poor world to its fate." The colors rippled in response.
"Confirmed," Voskresenye said, after a brief pause. "Gol an ix (KRIOL)?"
"I don't speak native KRIOL either," I admitted, feeling thoroughly outclassed. "Only interpreted."
"Well, I can tell you one thing," Keishi said. "He speaks a very high-class KRIOL. Judging by the number of parentheses he elides, he's been talking to computers that could parse Russian if they felt like it. He split the verb from its argument, too, and he used the pronoun 'ix' without a restrictive definition. He's been talking to AIs; I'd bet on it."
Thanks, I said. I wasn't sure what use the information was, but better to have Keishi feeding me trivia than heckling Voskresenye.
To my relief, Voskresenye switched to Russian. "Even so," he said, in a tone of pleased surprise, "you speak KRIOL. How quaint. Nothing has quite the appeal of a dead language; it's no accident that most of the world's great religions have been conducted in them."
"KRIOL isn't dead," I said.
"Not in Russia," he said dismissively. "It is in Africa, where it matters."