"James P. Hogan - The Immortality Option" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

and in its liquid and solid phases on the surface, thus playing a role comparable to that of water on Earth.
Some scientists speculated that the hidden surface of Titan could consist of methane oceans and
water-ice continents covered by nitrogenous hydrocarbon soil precipitated from the upper atmosphere,
with methane rain falling from methane clouds formed below the aerosol blanket. It was even possible
that radioactive heat released in the interior might maintain reservoirs of water that could escape to the
surface as ice "lava" and perhaps provide a fluid substrate for mountain building and other tectonic
processes.
And, indeed, radar mapping by theDauphin orbiter revealed vast oceans, islands, continents, and
mountains below the all-enveloping clouds, the details of which were published and caused widespread
excitement. The public account, however, left out the highly reflective objectsтАФsuggestive of huge
metallic constructionsтАФwhich in some cases extended for miles, along with the glimpses of strange
machines transmitted back by theDauphin 's short-lived surface landers.
The Europeans shared their knowledge of what was presumed to be an advanced alien culture only
with the Americans, who at that time were alone in possessing a large, long-range craft in a sufficiently
advanced stage of development to follow up on the discovery. This was the pulsed-fusion-drivenOrion ,
the development of which had been partly funded by a private consortium centered on the General
Space Enterprises Corporation (GSEC) specifically for manned exploration of the outer planets.
Launched, crewed, and managed operationally by the newly formed North Atlantic Space Organization
(NASO), theOrion mission to Titan departed two years later.
In addition to NASO personnel, the mission included scientists from a wide range of disciplines,
linguists and psychologists because of the prospect of encountering some form of intelligence, and a
force selected from elite American, British, and French military units to afford a measure of protection,
since the probable reaction and disposition of that intelligence were unknown. In this age of mass culture
the GSEC directors were mindful that any future policy toward Titan that they might consider beneficial
to their interests would need strong public support to be viable. Accordingly, at their instigation, the
mission also included a major celebrity from a field that the antiscience reaction of recent times had
endowed with significant public influence, which GSEC hoped to be able to exploit to its advantage: the
super-"psychic," Karl Zambendorf. Along with him went the team of assistants that accompanied him
everywhere.
What the mission found on Titan was more astonishing than anything that even the most fanciful
interpreters of theDauphin data had imagined. Below the cloud cover, Titan was inhabited by a living,
evolving biosphere of machines. Sprawling tangles of self-reproducing industrial technology proliferating
out of control extended across huge tracts of the surface. And roaming around this mechanical "jungle"
were various kinds of freely mobile machines that apparently formed part of a weird yet apparently
functional ecology.
The only explanation the bemused Terran scientists could conceive was that it had all somehow
mutated from an automated, self-replicating industrial complex set in motion by some alien culture long
before. What alien culture? Where were they now? What had gone wrong? Why Titan? Nobody had
answers.
But perhaps the most amazing find of all was that this unique form of life had evolved its own
bizarre brand of intelligence. The scientists dubbed the beings the Taloids, after an artificially created
bronze man in Greek mythology. They were an upright, bipedal species of self-aware robot that wore
clothes, tamed and reared mechanical "animals," grew their houses from pseudo-vegetable cultures, and
worshiped a mythical nonmachine machine maker, which they reasoned must have created the first life.
They saw the miles of proliferating machinery as "forests" and quarried ice to build their cities. As nearly
as could be approximated, the Taloid culture was comparable in its level of progress to Europe's at the
time of the Renaissance; accordingly, the Terrans dubbed the Taloids' geographic political groupings
after the medieval Italian city-states.
In terms of advancement and productive potential, the technology running wild all over Titan
surpassed anything that existed on Earth. The backers of theOrion mission quickly realized that whoever