"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 1 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

The Demons At Rainbow Bridge -- Jack L. Chalker -- (1989)

PRINTING HISTORY
Ace hardcover edition/September 1989 Ace paperback edition/June 1990
All rights reserved. Copyright о 1989 by Jack L. Chalker.
Cover art by Darrell Sweet.
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ISBN: 0-441-69992-8
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For Cliff Simak,
who loved the idea he partly inspired,
but then didn't stick around
to see what I did with it.

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 below 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 son 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 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 evaluators 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 while 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, distinguished 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 bent.
It was a fact that all scouts were mad; the debate still raged as to whether the demands of the job drove them mad or whether they were mad at the start. In their pasts, most races had seemed to have a very small number of the breed no matter how different they otherwise were; these were the pathfinders, the wilderness explorers, the ones who pushed on alone into blanks on the maps. It had been suspected that some factor -- anything from genetic engineering to just too much civilization -- would breed them out of existence, and it was true that a few races now dominated the field, but, somehow, whenever someone discovered a new blank on some map, a scout always seemed to be there.
This one happened to be named Cymak, a bipedal creature of the basic Class II shape, with two arms and two legs and a thick torso. He also happened to have lumpy, mottled skin the color of rotted sewage, which was so thick some bullets wouldn't penetrate it, and a triangular-shaped head that seemed to bob about as if it were on a spring rather than a segmented neck. His ancestors, before the age of synthetics, had fed on giant insect-like creatures by punching holes in them while they still lived and sucking out the fluids. He called himself and his physical race Xymonths, which, of course, basically translated as "human being," like most of the exotic names that intelligent life forms called themselves. For terms like racial origin and planetary names the interstellar tongue deferred to the local one. Otherwise there would be several hundred "human beings" who considered all but their own kind "nonhuman," and almost all of them would refer to the mother world of their races as "Earth."
The triangular head bobbed and weaved like an unattended jack-in-the-box in the wind, as it looked over the data digests on the screens. So far, the data looked good. So far, in fact, it looked too good. Worlds well within the carbon-based life zone that contained a readily balanced oxygen-nitrogen mixture within half a per cent of optimum along with the proper water balance were quite rare. Normally you took what you found and then brought in an Exploiter Team to reengineer the world into something useful, or, even more frequently when these kinds of worlds were found, there was already some form of higher life calling it home.
Not here. There were vast forests and dense jungles all right, and high mountain ranges, and it was perhaps a tad too volcanic for absolute perfection, but so far the surveys had shown no signs of an indigenous race of sentient beings. Oh, you could find the basics there -- creatures that took the ecological position of insects, some high-level herbivores and the inevitable carnivores preying on them and pruning their herds, and some rather odd ocean life as well, but nothing to show that anything higher than that had ever evolved here.
Of course, as Cymak knew well, you could never be a hundred per cent sure, even if you stayed a month. Intelligence came in the oddest packages and didn't always fit the conventional molds. More than once he, and almost all the other scouts, had certified a world as "exploitable," only to have Exploiter Teams later discover rather nasty surprises down there. That was what Exploiters got paid for.
Cymak's job was to check the obvious. Structures, signs of environmental alteration, patterns that would show species dominance, that sort of thing. If there was any kind of real intelligence on this world, it wasn't the conventional sort.
"There is an anomaly," the ship's computer reported to him. "I had a number of passes made when it showed up, just to make certain, and sent in the highest resolution photographic gear once it was isolated. It is on the east coast of the smaller continent in the northern hemisphere. It is definitely an artificial structure."
"Just one?" The Xymanth responded.
"Yes. One structure on the entire planet."
That was bad. Worse than a horde of screaming natives, in fact, because one could often do something even with a primitive population -- but a single structure probably indicated that somebody else had found the place first.
''Identification?"
*'Unknown. That is, the structure is of no known type either in the Exchange or in the Mycohl or Mizlaplan groups. In fact, I did not report it immediately because the readings it gave off indicated malfunctions in my own equipment."
"Put up your best shots on the screens," the scout instructed.
The screens blinked and then showed various passes in full three dimensions. Cymak immediately understood the ship's problem -- the artifact was unlike anything he'd ever seen before. In fact, the five views presented to him didn't even look much like each other.
"These are not five separate structures? These are all views of the same single object?"
"One object, same coordinates. You can see why I suspected a defect. I checked for all known types of shielding and found nothing in the registers. As far as I can determine, there was nothing to filter or distort the shots you see. The material and basic dimensions, at least, are consistent."
The first view showed a structure that resembled nothing so much as a great amber-colored crystal of fine quartz perhaps forty meters long, its various facets showing clearly, its far end apparently rounded, its near end coming to a multifaceted taper ending in a point. The second shot showed something the same size and color, but now it seemed concave, as if the top were turned inward. The third shot resembled the first, but the smooth sides of each facet were different, as if the damned thing had somehow turned. On the fourth there was no point, but rather a yawning cavity that seemed to reach back half the length of the thing. The fifth was the most disconcerting, with the object seemingly segmented into quarters, with each turned slightly off the other so that the facet walls were broken up and did not match.
"Well, something is causing distortion," the Xymanth noted. "Unless that thing is alive and kicking. Composition?"
"Every analysis comes up with indistinct data," the computer told him. "All I can tell you is that it is solid, appears to have some of the properties of glass or glassine plastic, that it is opaque, and that the substance does not appear to exist anywhere else on the planet, either artificially or naturally. There are indications of a low yield energy source there but little else. It is effectively dead to all remote analytical tools. There are no signals emanating from it otherwise, so it is not a beacon, and if it is some son of downed vessel from an unknown civilization, it is not broadcasting anything we can monitor even as a distress signal, although in any event I would find it inconceivable that such a structure could have flown or even been carried here by any known means of transport or propulsion."
4'Life scan?"
"I get no life-form readings that are not consistent with the natural life of the planet. If anyone's home, they either do not match any known type of life or they are very well hidden inside that thing."
"In other words," the scout muttered, "you, the most sophisticated and knowledgeable device any known technology can create and program to answer any question and hazard exacting theories on almost any eventuality with a command of facts and data and a thought speed incomprehensibly better than my own -- you are telling me, essentially, that my guess is as good as yours. Right?"
"Probably better than mine," the ship responded. "I do not have nearly your capacity for wild flights of imagination."
"So it's not a spaceship, not a cargo module, not a house built with materials found on the planet, either. So how did it get there?"