"Nancy Kress - Probability Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

PROBABILITY MOON
by NANCY KRESS (2000)


[VERSION 1.1 (Nov 27 04). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the version
number by 0.1 and redistribute.]



For Charles, who certainly earned it

Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation from others, and thus
affords them the possibility of dignity. They loathe liberty because it throws them back on their
own abilities and resources, and thus confronts them with the possibility of insignificance.
--THOMAS SZASZ



-=*=-



PROLOGUE
LOWELL CITY, MARS

The aide materialized beside General Stefanak at a most inconvenient moment. The girl with
him was too schooled to react; she'd been with her company for two years now, and it was the
most popular and discreet first-class company on Titan. The girl took no notice of the intrusion,
but the general lost his erection. "I'm so sorry, sir," the holo said, averting Malone's eyes, "but
there is a level-one message."
"You are not to blame," the general said ritualistically. "One moment."
The girl was already pulling on her dress, eyes properly downcast. She would, of course, be
paid anyway. Stefanak put on a robe and bowed to her; she returned the gesture and left through
the side door. Her long black hair flowed down her back, the ends glowing with tiny holographic
beads. There had been nothing holographic about the rest of her. This level-one had better be
important.
He walked into his outer office and waited for Malone, who probably had to travel across the
base from Communications. Level-one messages were physically encoded and hand carried. This
one must have just come through a few moments ago. While he waited, Stefanak poured himself
a drink, thinking about the girl.
Maybe he needed his hormone levels adjusted again. He wasn't eighty anymore.
Malone appeared with the communication cube, bowed, and left. Stefanak activated the
security shield. While it was on, nothing could enter or leave his quarters. No electromagnetic
radiation, no compression waves, no air, not even neutrinos. Then he switched on the cube, using
level-one protocols.
It was from a recon team to a remote and unimportant planet, funded and mounted by soft-
science professors at Princeton University, for the usual squishy "research." But every recon team
had a line-rank military representative on it. Usually junior officers fought not to go on recon.
Usually it was an E-year of irrelevant boredom on primitive planets, most of them uninhabited.
Not this time.