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

could gain control of that potential would cease to have any effective competition on Earth, commercially
or politically. Therefore, just when the Taloids were beginning to challenge the old feudal tyrannies and
experiment with more liberal ways of governing their affairs, the mission's GSEC-backed leaders
adopted an interventionist policy aimed at keeping the traditional rulers in power as local puppets to run
the intended neocolony.
Public opinion back on Earth was misled by distorted accounts of what was going on, and for a
while the future of the Taloids looked bleak. But then, more by accident than through any deliberate
design, Zambendorf and his crew became the instigators of a new "religion" that swept through the
Taloid nations, causing them to throw out the old, authoritarian powers and their teachings, and hence to
reject the intervention of the powers from Earth that were trying to prop up the old system.
The resulting exposures became the subject of an international scandal, causing GSEC to be
relieved of its control and NASO to assume full command of the Titan mission. The GSEC
representatives and associates left ignominiously with theOrion when the time came for it to return to
Earth. Zambendorf and his team, however, remained as part of the mixed complement of NASO
personnel, scientists, and a small military detachment left behind to carry on the work at Titan until the
arrival of the newly completed Japanese shipShirasagi, due five months after theOrion 's departure.




I
The Psychic Who Valued Reason
1
According to the computers that provided a rudimentary translation between English and the strings
of ultrasonic pulses via which the aliens communicated, the Taloids called it a river. And, indeed, its
functions were comparable to those of a river: It flowed through the forest, attracting and sustaining life;
it brought nutrients down from distant sources; and it carried away the debris, detritus, and wastes that
were inevitable products of life in action.
In reality, the "river" was an immense conveyor line rolling through miles of machines and assembly
stations, all thumping, whining, pounding, and buzzing on either side beneath an overhanging canopy of
power lines, data cables, ducting, and pipes. The river came from more thinly mechanized regions,
forming gradually out of the mergings of lesser transfer lines serving local material-processing centers and
clusters of parts-making machines. Farther down it broadened, fed by incoming tributaries bringing ever
more complex subassemblies and recycled parts. These flowed onward to fabrication centers lower
down, which included the assembly sites for the peculiar machine "animals" and, at a number of
specialized locations, for the Taloids themselves. And finally, everything that had not been utilizedтАФ
components rejected by the sorting machines, substandard assemblies, unwanted pieces and parts
picked up by the roving scavenger machinesтАФwas consumed in reduction furnaces and recovered as
elementary materials for reprocessing.
The waste and inefficiency were enormous. In some places masses of jammed and defunct
machinery stood in idle decay, partly dismantled by the scavengers. Piles of nuts, bolts, strands of wire,
cuttings, and stampings covered the ground everywhere like a layer of forest humus. Entire lines of
design died out, while others appeared in their place. But amid it all, as with the carbon-chemistry variety
of life that had taken possession of distant Earth, the common thread that bound them all together as
descendants from the same remote ancestral event managed somehow to sustain itself and endure.
It was like trying to find your way through a General Motors plant in diving gear with the lights out,
Dave Crookes thought, perspiring and cursing inside his dome-helmeted extravehicular suit as he
clambered over a gap in a line of pumping stations thick with hydraulic-line couplings. The Taloid in the
leadтАФknown as Franklin among the TerransтАФwaited a couple of paces ahead, while Armitage, the
military escort assigned to the party, held aside a web of cables hanging like vines from the supports of a