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

Saucier shrugged. "They want us too. We're what they've got."
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker turned away from his supervisor. He looked at his desk, the keyboard with
the smudges where his hands touched most often, the corkboard with the photos of his father and sisters
on Earth, the... "And I'll bet the university isn't secure enough for them."
"We have the rest of the week to pack."
"Where?"
"A construction base in the Belt."
Hrecker made a face. "Maybe Security should have spotted that plant."
"They'd have jailed you as a gypsymp, a Gypsy sympathizer."
"More work for the rest of you."
Saucier showed his teeth in a grim smile. "You wouldn't be any better off yourself."
***


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CHAPTER 2

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Once upon a time, the valley had been a bowl rimmed by steep bluffs, its floor purpled by a carpet of
low, mosslike plants and watered by a small lake a little to the west of center. In the woods atop the
bluffs had lived creatures about the size of German shepherds. They had eaten the plump white
mossberries and drunk from the shore of the lake. They had caught small amphibians and fish and the
larvae of the bird-like dumbos, dug for roots and grubs, raided the nests of egg-layers. Occasionally one
group had met another, and then they had screeched and screamed and thrown things. Sometimes they
had fought, all tooth and claw, blood on the ground, tufts of fur on the shrubbery, even a body or two to
eat.
Strangers had fallen from the sky on tongues of flame, burning the moss away where the bluffs
flattened to the east, blackening the yellow soil with char. They had named the creatures Racs, studied
every detail of their structure, and in time decided to tweak the blueprints that made them what they
were. The new Racs that resulted walked erect, had hands instead of paws, and had larger brains.
The lake was still there. The landing field was green again, covered with moss. The Racs picked
berries there, played games, and on suitable occasions gathered by the thousands to stare into the
heavens where their Remakers had gone.
There were legends of that day, when the night-sky spark that was their vehicle, the Gypsy, had
spouted flame and vanished.
The center of the valley was still dominated by the Worldtree the strangers had grown before they left.
Yet that Worldtree was no longer a simple spike that jutted from the ground, its tip swollen to hold the
strangers' heritage. Its base was surrounded by a complex of stone buildings several stories high. Beyond
the buildings the moss remained, broken now by gravel paths, stone benches, and thickets of alien vines.
It stretched almost to the bluffs, where dormitories and homes and shops for those who served the
Worldtree formed a wall of masonry and wood as imposing as the bluffs alone had ever been.
A Rac standing on one of the gravel paths that linked the valley's center to its rim could have glimpsed,
through arched passageways and alleys, the stream of traffic on the ring road that encircled the valley just
outside the wall of buildings. The road's tributaries led to the mouths of tunnels carved into the bluffs to
reach a maze of natural caverns where masons had leveled floors, built walls and ramps, and installed
reinforcing pillars. Roadways wound through the caverns, and the widest sloped ever upward, finally