"Ken MacLeod - A Case of Consilience" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

artificial intelligence: in Donald's own lifetime he'd seen Synods, Assemblies and Curia debate them and
come to a Christian near-consensus acceptable to all but the lunaticтАФno, he must be charitableтАФthe
fundamentalist fringe.

And then, once more, just when the dust had settled, along had comeтАФpredictable as a planet,
unpredicted like a cometтАФanother orb in God's great orrery of education, or shell in the Adversary's
arsenal of error-mongery, the greatest challenge of allтАФalien intelligent life. It was not one that had
been altogether unexpected. Scholastics had debated the plurality of worlds. The Anglican C. S. Lewis
had considered it in science fiction; the agnostic Blish had treated it with a literally Jesuitical subtlety.
The Christian poet Alice Meynell had speculated on alien gospels; the godless ranter MacDiarmid had
hymned the Innumerable Christ. In the controversies over the new great discovery, all these literary
precedents had been resurrected and dissected. They pained Donald to the quick. Well-intended, pious,
sincere in their seeking they might be; or skeptical and satirical; it mattered not: they were all mockeries.
There had been only one Incarnation; only one sufficient sacrifice. If the Reformation had meant
anything at all, it meant that. To his ancestors Donald might have seemed heinously pliant in far too
much, but like them he was not to be moved from the rock. In the matter of theological science fiction
he preferred the honest warning of the secular humanist Harrison. Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the
streets of AshkelonтАж

Donald left the messroom after his next round and walked to his quarters. The corridor's topology was as
weird as anything on the ETC Station. A human-built space habitat parked inside an alien-built
wormhole nexus could hardly be otherwise. The station's spin didn't dislodge the wormhole mouths,
which remained attached to the same points on the outside of the hull. As a side-effect, the corridor's
concave curve felt and looked convex. At the near ends of stubby branch corridors, small groups of
scientists and technicians toiled on their night-shift tasks. At the far ends, a few meters away, thick glass
plates with embedded airlocks looked out on to planetary surfaces and sub-surfaces, ocean depths, tro-
pospheric layers, habitat interiors, virtual reality interfaces, and apparently vacant spaces backdropped
with distant starfields. About the last, it was an open question whether the putatively present alien minds
were invisible inhabitants of the adjacent vacuum, or more disturbingly, some vast process going on in
and among the stars themselves. The number of portals was uncountable. There were never more than
about five hundred, but the total changed with every count. As the station had been designed and built
with exactly three hundred interface corridors, this variability was not comfortable to contemplate. But
that the station's structure itself had somehow become imbricated with the space-time tangle outside it
had become an acceptedтАФif not precisely an acknowledgedтАФfact. It received a back-handed

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 MacLeod, Ken - A Case of Consilience

recognition in the station's nickname: the Etcetera Station.

Use of that monicker, like much else, was censored out of messages home. The Station was an EU
military outpost, and little more than its existence, out beyond the orbit of Neptune, had been revealed.
Donald Maclntyre, in his second year of military service as a conscript chaplain, had been as surprised to
find himself here as his new parishioners were to discover his affiliation. His number had come up in the
random allocation of clergy from the list of religions recognized by the EU Act of TolerationтАФthe one
that had banned Scientology, the Unification Church, the Wahabi sect and, by some drafting or
translation error, Unitarian UniversalismтАФbut to a minister of the Church of Scotland, there could in all
conscience be no such thing as chance. He had been sent here for a purpose.

"The man in black thinks he's on a mission from God," said Qasim.