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

whirred softly, steadily within the metal torso.)
Once more a limb flicked at a pressure plate, moved this time by feel
alone. The ship, fully visible to any hypothetical viewer outside its
hull, was for practical purposes totally transparent to its crew. A
circuit warmed instantly to life. Radiation sensors picked up the
electrical field of the planet, converted it to audio range, broadcast
it
within Khons: a howl, a moan. With each pulsation of the planet's ruddy
illumination the sound modulated through an obscene parody of some
despairing sigh.
"If only Holst had known!" the synthesized voice of Shoten whispered.
"If
only he had known."
Yuggoth's surface sped beneath the ship, its terrible velocity of
rotation
making features slip away as others rushed toward the viewers, flashed
beneath and dropped away, disappearing across the sprawling horizon
into
interstellar blackness. Great viscous plates of darkly glowing,
semi-solid
 rock hundreds of kilometers across rolled and crashed majestically.
Between them red-hot magma glowed balefully, great tongues of liquid
rock
licking upward between the pounding solid plates, the heat and
brightness
of the magma growing and lessening in a slow, steady rhythm that
Khons's
cyberbiots and audio-scanners converted into a contrabass
throb-throb-throb-throb.
"There can be no life there," Njord Freyr announced. "Nothing could
live
in that environment. Nothing could ever have lived there."
After a silence Sri Gomati challenged him. "The planet itself, Njord
Freyr. Could it be a single organism? The sounds, the movement, the
energy." She raised her organic hand to her brow, ran scores of
writhing
digits from the brow-line above her glittering silver eyes, across her
satiny naked skull to the base of her neck.
"It could be a nascent sun," Shoten Binayakya whispered. "Were Jupiter
larger, more energetic -- you know it has been suggested that Jupiter is
a
failed attempt at the creation of a partner for Sol, that our own solar
system is an unsuccessful venture at the formation of a double star."
"And Yuggoth?" Gomati dropped her tentacular hand to her lap.
Njord Freyr's voice contained only a tincture of sarcasm. "Sent by some
remote godling to undo Jupiter's failure, hey? How do we know that it's
always been here? Before now we knew it existed at all only through
courtesy of Neptune's and Pluto's perturbations. How do we know this
Yuggoth isn't a new arrival in the system? Nobody knew that Neptune or
Pluto existed until a few centuries ago!"