"01 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

TWO DEMONS
IN AMBER

The ship that roamed the sea of stars descended from heaven
toward the blue-green eden below, as always, looking for the
snake.

In the colorful terminology of Sector Mapping, the world be-
low and its solar system were in the area labeled in the common
language of interstellar commerce as Rainbow Bridge, after the
sounds used to translate the X-Y plotting coordinates on a map.
The words used for the symbols had no intrinsic meaning, and
there was no indication that the union of these accidental words
would be prophetic.

For nine days the small, crossbow-shaped scouting ship had
lain off the planet, while its carefully laid satellites, like the eggs
of a giant bird, had circled and crossed every square millimeter
of the planet's surface, photographing and mapping. Other eggs of
a different sort had been sent first to the atmosphere to sample
and test it and then gently to the ground in selected spots, and
even on and under the great seas that, from a height, seemed to
engulf and dominate the continental land masses. All of these
sent a steady stream of data back to the mother ship, where
computers compiled, checked, sorted, double-checked, and
evaluated the flood of information received from its children.

The process could, in fact, have been totally automated, but
very smart beings had learned over the years that you would
never remember to program it for all eventualities, and that ships
with their own artificial intelligence and full evaluative skills
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ultimately never seemed to have both a sense of aesthetics and
the horse-trader's know-how that could tell the measurably right
from the commercially right. The ship could do it all on its own,
but a second opinion from a different breed was always required.

The breed of living evatuators that accompanied the swift scout
ships into those blank spots on the star charts known only by
their colorful coordinates might have feathers or scales, fingers
or tentacles, might have been hatched from an egg or grown
from a pod; it might be male, female, neither, or all of the
above, and white it usually breathed oxygen, it might well be
more comfortable breathing water or methane or a half dozen
other substances. For all that, it was a single breed, distin-
guished not by its form or race or birthright but by the fact that
those of that breed called scout had to be of a singular mental