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

The cold gas people are on our heels. They can get robust states where we can't: if they make any more
progress it's us who'll become the backwater. You know?'
'I know.'
 Kearney, at the door, offered him the white cat. She twisted about in his hands. Her brother was still
looking at the empty display.
'Have you got names for them yet?'
Tate looked embarrassed.
'Only the female,' he said. 'I thought we could call her Justine.'
'Very apt,' Kearney admitted. That evening, rather than face an empty house, he called his first wife,
Anna.
 TWO

Gold Diggers of 2400 AD




K-captain Seria Mau Genlicher was up in the halo with her ship, the White Cat, trolling for customers.
Up there, a thousand lights out of the galactic Core, the Kefahuchi Tract streams across half the sky,
trailing its vast invisible plumes of dark matter. Seria Mau liked it there. She liked the halo. She liked the
ragged margins of the Tract itself, which everyone called 'the Beach', where the corroded old pre-human
observatories wove their chaotic orbits, tool-platforms and laboratories aban-doned millions of years
previously by entities who had no idea where they were тАФ or perhaps anymore what they were. They
had all wanted a closer look at the Tract. Some of them had steered whole planets into position, then
wandered off or died out. Some of them had steered whole solar systems into position, then lost them.
Even without ell that stuff, the halo would have been a hard place to navigate. That made it a good
hunting ground for Seria Mau, who now lay at a kind of non-Newtonian standstill inside a classic orbital
tangle of white dwarf stars, waiting to pounce. She liked this time the best. Engines were shut down.
Coms were shut down. Everything was shut down so she could listen.
Some hours ago she had lured a little convoy тАФ three dynaflow freighters, civilian ships carrying
'archeological' artefacts out of a mining belt twenty lights along the Beach, hurried along anxiously by a
fast armed yawl called La Vie F├йerique тАФ into this benighted spot and left them there while she went
and did something else. Her ship's mathematics knew exactly how to find them again: they, however, tied
to standard Tate-Kearney transformations, barely knew what day it was. By the time she returned, the
yawl, overburdened by its duty of care, had got the freighters into the shadow of an old gas giant while it
tried to calculate a way out of the trap. She watched them curiously. She was calm, they were not. She
could hear their communications. They were beginning to suspect she was there. La Vie F├йerique had
sent out drones. Tiny actinic spangles of light showed where these had begun to encounter the minefields
she had sown into the gravitational subcurrents of the cluster days before the freighters arrived.
'Ah,' said Seria Mau Genlicher, as if they could hear her. 'You should be more careful, out here in
empty space.'
As she spoke, the White Cat slipped into a cloud of non-baryonic junk, which, reacting weakly to her
passage through it, stroked the hull like a ghost. A few dials woke up in the manual back-up systems in
the empty human quarters of the ship, flickered, dropped back to zero. As matter, it was barely there,
but the shadow operators were drawn to it. They gathered by the portholes, arranging the light that fell
around them so that they could make the most tragic picture, looking at themselves in mirrors, whispering
and running thin fingers across their mouths or through their hair, rustling their dry wings.
'If only you had grown like this, Cinderella,' they mourned, in the old language.
'Such a blessing,' they said.
Don't let me have to deal with this now, she thought.