"Coppel, Alfred - Goldenwing Cycle 01 - Glory UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Coppel Alfred)

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This is a work of fiction. AH the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
GLORY
Copyright й 1993 by Alfred Coppel
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Edited by David G. Hartwell Cover art by Darrell Sweet
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10010
Torо is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
ISBN: 0-812-52393-8
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-12452
First Tor edition: May 1993
First mass market edition: April 1994
Printed in the United States of America 098765432 1
Once againЧfor Elisabeth.
a broad and ample road, whose dust is gold, and pavement stars, as stars to thee appear seen in the galaxy, that milky way which nightly as a circling zone thou seest powder 'd with stars.
him that yon soars on golden wing...
John Milton PARADISE LOST
IN THE OORT CLOUD
She is a Goldenwing and her name is Glory. Her bones are titanium plated with gold, and fragile as those of a bird. She wears a skin of monomolecular fabric; each strand of the thread from which it is woven is a single long molecule. Delicate as it is, it has withstood micrometeoroid strikes, asteroid collisions, and the dust between the stars. Glory is far older than her syndicate. She has outlived many syndicates before it.
She was built in orbit around the Moon, one thousand seven hundred of Earth's years ago. She is still one of the most beautiful artifacts ever made by Man.
Glory was completed in the last year of the Twenty-first CenturyЧnear the end of the Exodus and in the midst of a religious revival. The story is told that she was christened with holy water and blessed by a bishop. It may be so. In the last years of the Exodus there was a jihad. Christians were hunted down and slaughtered in the streets of a mostly Muslim world.
Glory was commissioned to carry preachers, priests, monks, and nuns to the safety of the stars. Her first destination was Ross 128/2, a world called Aldrin.
They named her Gloria CoelisЧGlory of Heaven. On her maiden voyage she carried four thousand New Catholics and seven thousand Protestants stacked in honeycomb holds,
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in frozen sleep, to sanctuary, eleven light-years from Earth.
Yet even as Glory spread her sails to the tachyon wind, the Exodus was ending. The homeworld, sick with religious slaughter and drained of her most adventurous souls, had grown weary. It would take a thousand years for the planet to restock itself with freedom and enough courage to continue the colonization of the stars.
At the completion of Glory's maiden voyage, she became the property of the men and women who sailed her, the first syndicate. Many changes of command later, she has become the ship of Duncan 's syndicateЧa fifth generation of Wired Starmen.
Glory and her people have been in space, with only short stays downworld, for twelve ship years. A working span for Starmen, many lifetimes for landsmen, who live by a different measure.
. The tachyons which flow from the galactic center are the only particles in the known universe that exceed the speed of light. The hectares of skylar sails a Goldenwing flies impede tachyons and transfer a fraction of their enormous energy to the ship. And as a Goldenwing approaches light-speed, time dilates. Objects in motion experience time more slowly than objects at rest. The laws of relativity are strange but inflexible.
At this moment, Glory is transiting the Oort Cloud of the system Luyten 726. She is slowing, but still moving at a fraction of the speed of light. In two shiptime days of twenty hours each, she will assume high orbit over Planet Luyten 726/4, known as Voerster. And on a hilltop on Voerster, where Glory is being watched nightly by an old astronomer whose dream it has been to live long enough to see a second Goldenwing, a month will pass before Glory's shuttles descend to the capital town of the Voertrekkers.
Time dilation plays strange games with short-lived humans.
GLORY
It is their spread of sail that gives Glory and her sister-ships the name of Goldenwing. Skylar is gossamer-thin and the color of sunlight. From Glory's ten-kilometer-long hull rise a half dozen slender masts. Angled at ninety degrees are her two mains. They rise fifty kilometers from carapace deck to masthead. There are three mizzens of thirty kilometers each and a foremast of ten. The monofil-ament rigging gleams' like a spider's web in the starlight of the Oort Cloud- The trim of Glory's tops and skysails can presently be monitored only by the hundreds of imaging devices scattered throughout the rig.
The radio environment surrounding the ship carries the chittering voices of the monkeys, small cyborgs who scurry .. through the rig performing the myriad tasks needed to keep a sailing ship moving at her best speed. Their voices are high-pitched, simian. They speak a language created for them by Glory's computer, part machine clicks and tones, part animal chirps and growls. It is exactly suited to the monkey-brained cyborgs; Glory is semisentient, and she provides for all her creatures.
Seen from the bridge and from the dorsal apertures in the hull, the eternal sky seems dominated by the eighty million square meters of bright skylar Glory flies. But that is only illusion. The Wired Ones know that humans are insignificant intruders among the stars.
In orbit around an inhabited world a Goldenwing is seen sailing across the night, a golden creature, wraithlike, silent, a vision of light and breathtaking, commanding beauty. It is a sight landsmen think themselves lucky to see once in a generation.
"There, " mothers tell their children. "Your great, great grandparents came here"Чfrom Earth, or Gagarin, or Christa McAuliffeЧ"in one of those beautiful things. Perhaps in that very one. "
There is fear in the women's voices. Wired Ones make
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demands. On Search they may ask for a child. Children chosen tend to submit willingly to the surgery and training. To those left behind they become an object of awe. On some worlds, like ice-covered Lalande 2, the chosen have been remembered as gods.
A Goldenwing in the sky is a promise of adventure, and of escape from the subsistence worlds where colonists struggle to survive. But now Goldenwings are very few, and the paucity echoes with ancestral sadness. A rare Goldenwing awakens memories of the blue Earth, and touches watchers with the melancholy of humanity's restless roaming.
The age of the sailing starships is nearly ended. They have performed great services. They have carried humanity to the near stars: to triple Centaurus, to Barnard's Star, Wolf, Lalande, to Sirius A and B, to the Ross pair, to Indi, to 61 Cygni, to the Luyten Stars. But it is nearly done now. It will take Earth thousands of her swift years to repopulate sufficiently to launch a second wave at the stars.
The colony worlds are primitive; few have progressed beyond hand labor and agriculture. It is not an easy thing to people an empty galaxy.
But it is an article of faith among Goldenwing crews that when Earth is reclaimed by her far-traveling children, they will not come in cold-sleep, aboard sublight sailing ships. They will come in new vessels, swifter than light, and armed with new sciences developed under foreign suns.
But this tomorrow will not dawn in Glory's time. Nor in the time of Duncan's syndicate. On some colony worlds interplanetary ships are built and manned. But Glory and her sisterships are the work of Earth, the homeworld. The golden starships and their Wired Ones, though fewer this century than last, are still the reaching hand of humankind.
There is a dead man in Glory's hold 1009. For him, relativity has ceased at last to have meaning. He was a
GLORY