"Greg Egan - Glory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Egan Greg)

тАЬThere are more tablets here, very close to the surface,тАЭ Rali announced excitedly. тАЬThe acoustics are
unmistakable.тАЭ Ideally they would have exca-vated the entire hillside, but they did not have the time or
the labor, so they were using acoustic tomography to identify likely deposits of accessible Niah writing,
and then concentrating their efforts on those spots.

The Niah had probably had several ephemeral forms of written commu-nication, but when they found
something worth publishing, it stayed pub-lished: they carved their symbols into a ceramic that made
diamond seem like tissue paper. It was almost unheard of for the tablets to be broken, but they were
small, and multitablet works were sometimes widely dispersed. Niah technology could probably have
carved three million yearsтАЩ worth of knowledge onto the head of a pinтАФthey seemed not to have
invented nanomachines, but they were into high-quality bulk materials and precision engineeringтАФbut for
whatever reason they had chosen legibility to the naked eye above other considerations.

Joan made herself useful, taking acoustic readings farther along the slope, while Sando watched over his
students as they came closer to the buried Niah artifacts. She had learned not to hover around
expectantly when a discovery was imminent; she was treated far more warmly if she waited to be
summoned. The tomography unit was almost foolproof, using satellite navigation to track its position and
software to analyze the signals it gath-ered; all it really needed was someone to drag it along the rock
face at a suitable pace.

From the corner of her eye, Joan noticed her shadow on the rocks flicker and grow complicated. She
looked up to see three dazzling beads of light flying west out of the sun. She might have assumed that the
fusion ships were doing something useful, but the media was full of talk of тАЬmilitary exercises,тАЭ which
meant the Tirans and the Ghahari were engaging in ex-pensive, belligerent gestures in orbit, trying to
convince each other of their superior skills, technology, or sheer strength of numbers. For people with no
real differences apart from a few centuries of recent history, they could puff up their minor political
disputes into matters of the utmost solemnity. It might almost have been funny, if the idiots hadnтАЩt
incinerated hundreds of thousands of each otherтАЩs citizens every few decades, not to mention playing
callous and often deadly games with the lives of the inhabitants of smaller nations.

тАЬJown! Jown! Come and look at this!тАЭ Surat called to her. Joan switched off the tomography unit and
jogged toward the archaeologists, suddenly conscious of her bodyтАЩs strangeness. Her legs were stumpy
but strong, and her balance as she ran came not from arms and shoulders but from the swish of her
muscular tail.

тАЬItтАЩs a significant mathematical result,тАЭ Rali informed her proudly when she reached them. HeтАЩd
pressure-washed the sandstone away from the near-indestructible ceramic of the tablet, and it was only a
matter of holding the surface at the right angle to the light to see the etched writing stand out as crisply
and starkly as it would have a million years before.

Rali was not a mathematician, and he was not offering his own opin-ion on the theorem the tablet stated;
the Niah themselves had had a clear set of typographical conventions which they used to distinguish
between everything from minor lemmas to the most celebrated theorems. The size and decorations of the
symbols labeling the theorem attested to its value in the NiahтАЩs eyes.

Joan read the theorem carefully. The proof was not included on the same tablet, but the Niah had a way
of expressing their results that made you believe them as soon as you read them; in this case the
definitions of the terms needed to state the theorem were so beautifully chosen that the result seemed
almost inevitable.