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

own
consciousness.
A great, dark body swam through the blackness, reflecting almost no
light
from the distant sun but glowing darkly, menacingly, pulsating in slow,
heartbeat-like waves, with a low crimson radiance that pained Njord
subliminally even through the ship's mechanisms and the processing of
the
cyberbiots. Fascinated yet repelled, Njord stared at the glowing,
pulsing
 globe.
About its obscene oblateness whirled a family of smaller bodies,
themselves apparently dim and lifeless, yet illuminated by the raking
sinister tone of their parent.

"Yuggoth," Sri Gomati's low whisper jolted Njord from his reverie.
"Yuggoth," and again, "Yuggoth!"
Njord snapped, "What's that?"
"Yuggoth," repeated Sri Gomati.
The male hissed in annoyance, watched the great pulsating bulk loom
larger
in Khons's external sensors, watched its family of moons, themselves
behaving like toy planets in orbit around the glowing body's miniature
sun.
"The great world must be Yuggoth," Sri Gomati crooned. "And the lessen
ones Nithon, Zaman; the whirling pair -- see them, see! -- Thog and its
twin Thok with the foul lake where puffed shoggoths splash."
"Do you know what she is raving about?" Njord demanded of Shoten
Binayakya, but Shoten only shook that ambivalent satiny head, two
silvery
eyes shimmering, stainless steel upper and lower monodonts revealed by
drawn-back organic lips.
Khons's remote sensors had accumulated enough data now, the ship's
cyberbiots computed and reduced the inputs, to provide a set of
readouts
on the new planetary grouping's characteristics. Shoten raised a
telescoping cyber-implant and pointed toward a glowing screen where
data
crept slowly from top to bottom.
"See," the ambiguous, synthesized voice purled, "the planet's mass is
gigantic. Double that of Jupiter. As great as six hundred Earths! More
oblate even than Jupiter also -- what is its spin?" Shoten paused while
more lines of information crept onto the screen. "Its rotation is even
shorter than Jupiter's. Its surface speed must be -- " He paused and
sent
a command through the ship's neurocyber network, grinned at the
response
that appeared on the screen.
"Think of resting on the surface of that planet and whirling about at
eighty thousand kilometers an hour!"