"David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 6" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hartwell David G)

Paul McAuley is a British writer who often writes hard SF, one of the group (along with Stephen
Baxter, Peter Hamilton, Iain M. Banks, and others) responsible for the hard SF/space opera
renaissance of the 1990s. His first novel, 400 Billion Stars, was co-winner of the Philip K. Dick
Award in 1988. He has since published a number of SF novels, of which Fairyland (1994) won the
Arthur C. Clarke and the John W. Campbell Awards for best novel and PasqualeтАЩs Angel (1994)
won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History fiction. He has two collections of short fiction, The
King of the Hill and Other Stories (1991) and The Invisible Country (1996). A year ago he
completed a trilogy of SF novels, The Book of Confluence ( Child of the River, 1997; Ancients of
Days, 1998; Shrine of Stars, 1999). His Web site is www.omegacom.demon.co.uk.
тАЬReefтАЭ is an excellent hard SF story from the ambitious (and mostly reprint) anthology,
Skylife, edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski (about visions of life in space and on
other planets, which reprints some wonderful SF art too). This story is an instant classic of hard
SF. It is dense with wonderful technological and scientific images, but also fast paced and
sufficiently rounded in characterization that the unlikely heroine, Margaret Henderson Wu, a
scientist to the core, will be remembered by many readers for a long time. It is interesting to
compare it to Stephen BaxterтАЩs тАЬSheena 5,тАЭ later in this book, in terms of scope and imagery.

Margaret Henderson Wu was riding a proxy by telepresence deep inside Tigris Rift when Dzu Sho
summoned her. The others in her crew had given up one by one and only she was left, descending slowly
between rosy, smoothly rippled cliffs scarcely a hundred meters apart. These were pavements of the
commonest vacuum organism, mosaics made of hundreds of different strains of the same species. Here
and there bright red whips stuck out from the pavement; a commensal species which deposited iron
sulphate crystals within its integument.
The pavement seemed to stretch endlessly below her. No probe or proxy had yet reached the
bottom, still more than thirty kilometers away. Microscopic flecks of sulfur-iron complexes, sloughed
cells, and excreted globules of carbon compounds and other volatiles made a kind of smog or snow, and
the vacuum organisms deposited nodes and intricate lattices of reduced metals that, by some trick of
superconductivity, produced a broad-band electromagnetic resonance that pulsed like a giantтАЩs slow
heartbeat.
All this futzed the telepresence link between operators and their proxies. One moment Margaret was
experiencing the 320-degree panorama of the little proxyтАЩs microwave radar, the perpetual tug of
vacuum on its mantle, the tang of extreme cold, a mere thirty degrees above absolute zero, the complex
taste of the vacuum smog (burnt sugar, hot rubber, tar), the minute squirts of hydrogen from the folds of
the proxyтАЩs puckered nozzle as it maintained its orientation relative to the cliff face during its descent, with
its tentacles retracted in a tight ball around the relay piton. The next, she was back in her cradled body in
warm blackness, phosphenes floating in her vision and white noise in her ears while the transmitter
searched for a viable waveband, locked on andтАФpowтАФshe was back, falling past rippled pink
pavement.
The alarm went off, flashing an array of white stars over the panorama. Her number two, Srin
Kerenyi, said in her ear, тАЬYouтАЩre wanted, boss.тАЭ
Margaret killed the alarm and the audio feed. She was already a kilometer below the previous bench
mark, and she wanted to get as deep as possible before she implanted the telemetry relay. She swiveled
the proxy on its long axis, increased the amplitude of the microwave radar. Far below were intimations of
swells and bumps jutting from the plane of the cliff face, textured mounds like brain coral, randomly
orientated chimneys. And something else, clouds of organic matter perhapsтАФ
The alarm again. Srin had overridden the cutout.
Margaret swore and dove at the cliff, unfurling the proxyтАЩs tentacles and jamming the piton into
pinkness rough with black papillae, like a giantтАЩs tongue quick frozen against the ice. The pitonтАЩs spikes
fired automatically. Recoil sent the little proxy tumbling over its long axis until it reflexively stabilized itself
with judicious squirts of gas. The link rastered, came back, cut out completely. Margaret hit the switch