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

the
nearly null-gravity conditions of Neptune's tiny moon Nereid, the ship
had
been ferried back, segment by segment, for assembly, for the cyborging
of
its scores of tiny biotic brains, on-loading of its three-member crew
and
its launch from the cratered rock surface of Pluto.
Njord, the male crew member, cursed, distracted by the radar gong,
angered
 by Gomati's inattention, humiliated by her amusement and by her drawing
away from himself and Shoten. Njord felt his organ grow flaccid at the
distraction, and for the moment he regretted the decision he had made
prior to the cyborging operations of his adolescence, to retain his
organic phallus and gonads. A cyborged capability might have proven
more
potently enduring in the circumstances but Njord's pubescent pride had
denied the possibility of his ever facing inconvenient detumescence.
Flung from rocky Pluto as the planet swung toward the ecliptic on its
nearly 18-degree zoom, the ship was virtually catapulted away from the
sun; it swung around Neptune, paid passing salute to the satellite of
its
birth with course-correcting emissions, then fled, a dart from the
gravitic sling, into the black unknown.
And Shoten, most extensively cyborged of the crew members, flicked a
mental command. Hooking into the ship's sensors, Shoten homed the
consciousness of the navigational biotic brains onto the remote
readouts
that spelled the location of the distant object. The readouts confirmed
suspected information about the object: its great mass, its incredible
distance beyond even the aphelion of the orbit of Pluto some eight
billion
kilometers from the sun -- the distant object circled its primary at a
distance twice as great as Pluto's farthest departure from the solar
epicenter.

The ship -- named Khons in honor of an ancient celestial deity -- held
life-support supplies for the three crew members and fuel and power
reserves for the complete outward journey, the planned landing on the
distant object, the return takeoff and journey and final landing not on
Pluto -- which by the time of Khons's return would be far above the
solar
ecliptic and beyond the orbit of Neptune -- but on Neptune's larger
moon
Triton where a reception base had been readied before Khons ever had
launched on its journey of exploration.

As for Njord, he grumbled under his breath, wishing almost irrelevantly
that he knew the original gender of Shoten Binayakya before the
latter's