"Richard A." - читать интересную книгу автора (Lupoff Richard A)

Shadrapha of Ugarit. And lost heart.
"And now. At last. We are here." She gestured with her flowing, waving
tentacles toward the diagram that glowed against the ship's dull
fittings.
"What course, Shoten Binayakya?' she asked brusquely.
The whirling bodies on the screen were marked in red, the pulsing red
of
Yuggoth's inner flames, the beating, reflected red of the madly dashing
moons. A contrasting object appeared on the screen, the flattened
cone-shape of the ship Khons, trailing in its wake as it wove among the
 bodies a line to show the course of its passage. Shortly the line had
woven past, circled about, curved beyond each body in the diagram,
leaving
the stylized representation of Khons in perturbated circular orbit
about
the entire system.
"So," purred Shoten Binayakya. And Sri Gomati and Njord Freyr in turn.
"So." "So."
Shoten Binayakya flicked a pressure plate with some limb, some tool.
Khons
bucked, slithered through a complex course correction. Shoten slapped
another plate and the full exterior optics of Khons were activated; to
the
three members of the crew, hooked into the cyberbiotic system of the
ship,
it was as if they fell freely through the distantly star-sprayed night.
Fell, fell toward red, glowing, pulsating Yuggoth and its family of
gray
dancing servants.
Khons, inserted into its new flight path, sped first past the outermost
of
Yuggoth's moons: a world of significant size. The ship's sensors and
cyberbiots reported on the body: in mass and diameter not far from the
dimensions of the familiar rock-and-water satellites of the outer
planets.
Close to five thousand kilometers through its center and marked with
the
nearly universal cratering of every solid world from Mercury to Pluto.
The twins, dubbed Thog and Thok by Gomati, whirled at the opposite
extremes of their interwoven orbits, so Khons flitted past the
innermost
of the four moons, another apparent replica of the familiar
Ganymede-Callisto-Titan-Triton model, then dropped into equatorial
orbit
about the dully glowing, oblate Yuggoth.
Njord, Gomati, Shoten Binayakya fell silent. The sounds of Khons's
automatic systems, the low hiss of recirculating air, the occasional
hum
or click of a servo, the slow breathing of Njord Freyr, of Sri Gomati,
were the only sounds. (Shoten Binayakya's lungs had been cybermeched,