"Thomas Easton - Organic Future 04 - Seeds of Destiny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

found in genes could permit a self-reproducing von Neumann machine to exist.
Artificial intelligence? They had that, though hardly at a human level, not even at the level rumor hinted
had been achieved some time before the Engineers' final victory. He had heard the robots compared to
cats and monkeys, and the reason for their limitation was once more that they were not organic. In some
ways, living things had distinct design advantages.
But not this African violet. Not at this moment. Not now. Not ever.
It could kill him.
He wished he dared to set the plant in its mug on one of those shelves, or on the floor. The machines
would dispose of it. That was their job. They were everywhere. They cleaned clothes and floors,
polished shoes, mended and repaired, stripped paint and replaced it, found and fetched lost items, and
prepared food, tending Olympia and all its people just as they did in the cities of Mars and Earth, the
Moon and the habitats, everywhere the Engineers chose to live.
But no one did such things. If he did, one of his fellow pedestrians would surely notice and report his
suspicious behavior. Or the cameras, wherever they were, would pick him up.
Better he should leave the plant under his shirt.
***


The short side-tunnel, filled with the pink-tinged light of Mars, opened into a concourse thirty meters
high. Its far wall was a curve of steel-ribbed glass. Beyond that was the red-rock lip of the scarp that
lifted Olympus Mons a kilometer above the lowlands beyond, and then those lowlands, softened and
smoothed into plains by distance. The only signs of human presence were a distant dome and a cloud of
yellow fumes beside the concentric rings of an open-pit mine.
No one paid the spectacular view any attention at all. No one seemed disturbed by the far-off
industrial stain on the landscape. Both were routine, backdrop, as accepted as the posters in the tour
shop's display cases.
 Marcus Aurelius Hrecker was no exception. When he left the tunnel, his mind was on the plant tucked
within his shirt, on his destination, on the tasks that awaited him. He turned sharp left, stepped aboard the
escalator in front of him, rode to the next level up, and entered another tunnel marked by a small brass
plaque that said "Olympus University." When Hrecker passed it, it repeated its message aloud.
Just within this tunnel was a directory board that displayed a map of the university's tunnels and a list of
departments, offices, and labs. Hrecker ignored this too. The Q-Drive Research Center where he was a
junior researcher was straight ahead and right and right and left, past the administration's side-tunnel and
the dining hall and the freshman dorms, just before the turn into the athletic complex, and late on any
afternoon the lab rocked with noise every time someone opened the main door to enter or leave.
Sometimes the din even penetrated the solid rock of Mars itself.
But the tunnels were quiet now. The day's first classes were in session. He glanced through the entry to
the dining hall and found it empty except for a few stragglers. The creak of exercise machinery was the
only sign that anyone was in the athletics area at all.
And here was the Research Center. He felt the flower mug with his wrist. Would he be able to reach
his lab before someone spotted it? Would he be able to bury it in a wastebasket? Should he flush the
plant and its soil down a toilet, wash its container, and pretend it had never held anything more
incriminating than a wooden pencil?
Of course, as soon as the entrance door swung shut behind him, Eric Silber came out of the com
room, his hands full of paper. "What's that? A tumor?"
Silber was a mathematician, but his sharply angled, acne-scarred face and cawing voice had prompted
more than one to suspect out loud that he was really a Security plant. Thereafter, no one quite dared to
trust him or to object to his bitter gibes. And of course he had seen the bulge in Hrecker's shirt.
"Just a..." He made a garbled noise, waved one hand, and turned quickly into the hall that led toward
his lab. When Eric did not follow him or say, "What?" he breathed a sigh of relief.