"James P. Hogan - Giants 4 - Entoverse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

constellation of Taurus.
In the millions of years that followed, the imported terrestrial animals
eclipsed and replaced the native Minervan forms, which, owing to a peculiarity
of early Minervan biology that had precluded the emergence of land-dwelling
carnivores, had evolved no prey-predator adaptations and were unable to
compete. These terrestrial types included a population of genetically modified
primates as advanced as anything that existed on Earth at the time. Almost
twenty-five million years later, fifty thousand years before the present,
while the various hominid lines that had been developing on Earth were just
yielding the first crude beginnings of stone-using cultures, a second
advanced, spacegoing race had already developed on Minerva: the first version
of modern Man, subsequently given the name Lunarians when the first evidence
of their existence was found in the course of early twenty-first-century
exploration of Earth's moon.
At the time of the Lunarians' emergence, the Solar System was entering
the most recent ice age. Conditions on Minerva were deteriorating, and the
Lunarian sciences and industrial technologies developed rapidly as part of a
long-term stratagem to move their civilization to the warmer and more
hospitable world of Earth.
But such was not to be.
When the Lunarians were practically within reach of the goal toward
which they had been working constructively for generations, they embarked on a
course of ruinous military rivalries that culminated in a cataclysmic war
between two superpowers, Cerios and Lambia, in the course of which the planet
Minerva was destroyed.
The Ganymeans by that time had established a thriving interstellar
civilization centered on the planet Thurien of the Giants' Star system. They
had never felt comfortable with what they regarded as their abandonment of a
genetic mutant that they expected would have no chance of survival, and they
had followed the progress of the Lunarians with a mixture of increasing guilt
and awe. But when they saw it all end in catastrophe, the Ganymeans forgot
their previous policy of nonintervention and appeared in time to save the last
few survivors from the war. Gravitational upheavals caused by the emergency
methods used to transport the Ganymean rescue mission threw what remained of
Minerva into an eccentric outer orbit to become Pluto, while the smaller
debris dispersed under Jupiter's tidal effects as the Asteroids. Minerva's
orphaned moon fell inward toward the Sun and was later captured by Earth.
Despite their experience, the surviving Lunarians remained hostile and
immiscible. The Lambians went back with the Ganymeans and were installed on a
world called Jevlen, eventually to become a fully integrated, human component
of the Thurien civilization. The Cerians were returned, at their own request,
to the world of their origins: Earth, where they were almost overwhelmed
shortly afterward by climatic and tidal upheavals caused by the arrival of
Minerva's moon. For thousands of years they reverted to barbarism, struggling
on the edge of extinction, and the knowledge of their origins was lost. Only
in modern times, when they at last climbed outward once more toward the stars
and found the traces of what had gone before, were they able to piece the
story together.
The Jevlenese never ceased regarding the people of Earth as Cerians. As
part of a plan for one day settling the score with their ancient rivals, they