"Edward L. Ferman - Best From F&SF, 23rd Edition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ferman Edward L)

again, they would crawl farther. There were dozens of them lying motionless in the sand within a
hundred-meter radius of the garden.
Two weeks of research left them knowing no more. They had to abandon the matthews for the time,
as another enigma had cropped up which demanded their attention.
This time Crawford was the last to know. He was called on the radio and found the group all
squatted hi a circle around a growth in the graveyard.
The graveyard, where they had buried their fifteen dead crewmates on the first day of the disaster,
had sprouted with life during the week after the departure of the Burroughs. It was separated from the
original site of the dome by three hundred meters of blowing sand. So McKillian assumed this second
bloom was caused by the water in the bodies of the dead. What they couldn't figure out was why this
patch should differ so radically from the first one.
There were whirligigs in the second patch, but they lacked the variety and disorder of the originals.
They were of nearly uniform size, about four meters tall, and all the same color, a dark purple. They had
pumped water for two weeks, then stopped. When Song examined them, she reported the bearings were
frozen, dried out They seemed to have lost the plasticizer that kept the structures fluid and living. The
water in the pipes was frozen. Though she would not commit herself in the matter, she felt they were
dead. In their place was a second network of pipes which wound around the derricks and spread
transparent sheets of film to the sunlight, heating the water which circulated through them. The water was
being pumped, but not by the now-familiar system of windmills. Spaced along each of the pipes were
expansion-contraction pumps with valves very like those in a human heart
The new marvel was a simple affair in the middle of that living petrochemical complex. It was a short
plant that sprouted up half a meter, then extruded two stalks parallel to the ground. At the end of each
stalk was a perfect globe, one gray, one blue. The blue one was much larger than the gray one.
Crawford looked at it briefly, then squatted down beside the rest, wondering what all the fuss was
about Everyone looked very solemn, almost scared.
"You called me over to see this?"
Lang looked over at him, and something in her face made him nervous.
"Look at it, Matt. Really look at it." So he did, feeling foolish, wondering what the joke was. He
noticed a white patch near the top of the largest globe. It was streaked, like a glass marble with swirls of
opaque material hi it. It looked very familiar, he realized, with the hair on the back of his neck starting to
stand up.
"It turns," Lang said quietly. "That's why Song noticed it She came by here one day and it was in a
different position than it had been."
"Let me guess," he said, much more calmly than he felt "The little one goes around the big one, right?"
"Right. And the little one keeps one face turned to the big one. The big one rotates once in
twenty-four hours. It has an axial tilt of twenty-three degrees."
"It's a ... what's the word? Orrery. It's an orrery." Crawford had to stand up and shake his head to
clear it.
"It's funny," Lang said, quietly. "I always thought it would be something flashy, or at least obvious. An
alien artifact mixed in with caveman bones, or a spaceship entering the system. I guess I was thinking hi
terms of pottery shards and atom bombs."
"Well, that all sounds pretty ho-hum to me up against this," Song said. "Do you ... do you realize . . .
what are we talking about here? Evolution, or ... or engineering? Is it the plants themselves that did this,
or were they made to do it by whatever built them? Do you see what I'm talking about? I've felt funny
about- those wheels for a long time. I just won't believe they'd evolve naturally."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I think these plants we've been seeing were designed to be the way they are. They're too
perfectly adapted, too ingenious to have just sprung up hi response to the environment" Her eyes seemed
to wander, and she stood up and gazed into the valley below them. It was as barren as anything that
could be imagined: red and yellow and brown rock outcroppings and tumbled boulders. And in the