"C. S. Friedman - Coldfire 2 - When True Night Falls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friedman C. S)

rival predators. Incompatible protein structures. Climatic
instability.

The key word there was predictable.

Case looked up at the starless night sky - so black, so
empty, so utterly alien - and found himself shivering. What
did a Terran seedship do when it had surveyed a thousand
systems - perhaps tens of thousands - and still it had found
no hospitable world for its charges? Would there come a
time when its microchips would begin to wear, when its
own mechanical senility would force it to make one less
than ideal choice? Or was all this the fault of the
programmers, who had never foreseen that a ship might
wander so far, for so long, without success? Go outward,
they had directed it, survey each planet you come across,
and if it does not suit your purpose, then refuel and go
outward farther still. He thought of Erna's midnight sky, so
eerie in its utter starlessness. What was a program like that
supposed to do when it ran out of options? When the next
move would take it beyond the borders of the galaxy, into
regions so utterly desolate that it might drift forever
without finding another sun, another source of fuel? Was it
supposed to leap blindly into that void, its circuits
undisturbed by the prospect of eternal solitude? Or would it
instead survey its last available option again and again,
time after time, until at last its circuits had managed
whatever convolution of logic was required to determine
that the last choice was indeed acceptable, by the terms of
its desperation? So that there, tens of thousands of light-
years from Earth, separated by a multimillenial gap in
communication, the four thousand colonists might be
awakened at last.

We'll never know, Commander Case thought grimly. The
bulk of the seedship was high above them now, circling the
tormented planet like an errant moon. They had brought all
the data down with them, each nanosecond's record of the
ninety-year survey - and he had studied it so often that
sometimes it seemed he knew each byte of it by heart. To
what end? Even if he could find some hint of danger in the
seedship's study, what good would it do them now? They
couldn't go back. They couldn't get help. This far out in the
galaxy they couldn't even get advice from home. The
seedship's programmers were long since dead, as was the
culture that had nurtured them. Communication with Earth
would mean waiting more than forty thousand years for an
answer - and that was if Earth was there to respond, and if it
would bother. What had the mother planet become, in the
millennia it had taken this seedship to find a home? The