"M. John Harrison - Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

undone.'
 'She is only little,' they said in unison.
Her answering cry could barely contain the force of all her grief and self-disgust and unvoiced rage.
Whatever she had told them in the Motel Splendido parking orbit, she had changed her mind. Seria Mau
Genlicher wanted to be human again. Although when she looked at her passengers, she often wondered
why.

There were four or five of them, she thought. From the beginning they were hard to count because one of
the women was a clone of the other. They had come aboard with a round tonne of field-generating
equipment and a confident saunter. Their clothes looked practical until you saw how soft the fabrics
were. The hair of the women was brush-cut and lightly moussed to have a semiotic of assertion. The men
wore discreet brand-implants, animated logos, tributes to the great corporates of the past. The White
Cat, with her air of stealth and clear military provenance, brought out the boy in them. None of them had
ever talked to a K-captain before. 'Hi,' they said shyly, unsure where to look when Seria Mau spoke.
And then, to each other, as soon as they thought they were alone: 'Hey! Yes! Weird or what?'
'Please keep the cabins tidy,' Seria Mau interrupted them.
She monitored their affairs, especially their almost constant sexual activity, through nanocameras
lodged in corners, or folds of clothing, or drifting about the human quarters like specks of dust. Dial-up,
at almost any time, brought in ill-lit, undersea images of human life: they ate, they exercised, they
defecated. They copulated and washed, then copulated again. Seria Mau lost count of the combinations,
the raised buttocks and straddled legs. If she turned up the sound, someone would always be whispering,
'Yes.' All the men fucked one of the women; then the woman fucked her clone while the men watched. In
daily life, the clone was pliable, tender, prone to fits of sudden angry weeping or to asking financial
advice. She was so unsure, she said. About everything. They fucked her, slept, and later asked Seria
Mau if she could turn the artificial gravity off.
'I'm afraid not,' Seria Mau lied.
She was both disgusted and fascinated by them. The poor resolution of the nanocams gave their
actions something of the quality of her dreams. Was there some connection?
She practised murmuring, 'Oh yes, that.'
At the same time she examined the equipment stowed in the White Cat's hold. As far as she could see
it had little to do with exogeology, but was designed to maintain small quantities of isotopes in wildly
exotic states. Her passengers were prospectors. They were on the Beach, just like everyone else,
looking for an earner. She became inexplicably angry, and the ship's mathematics sent her to sleep again.

It woke her almost immediately.
'Look at this,' it said.
'What?'
'Two days ago I deployed particle detectors astern,' it said (although 'astern', it felt bound to warn her,
was an almost meaningless direction in terms of the geometries involved), 'and began counting significant
quantum events. This is the result.'
'Two days ago?'
'Stochastic resonance takes time.'
Seria Mau had the data piped into her tank in the form of a signature diagram and studied them. What
she saw was limited by the White Cat's ability to represent ten spatial dimensions as four: an
irradiated-looking grey space, near the centre of which you could see, knotted together, some worms of
spectral yellow light, constantly shifting, pulsing, bifurcating and changing colour. Various grids could be
laid over this model, to represent different regimes and analyses.
'What is it?' she said.
'I think it's a ship.'
Seria Mau studied the image again. She ran comparison studies. 'It isn't any kind of ship I know. Is it