"Ken MacLeod - Engines of Light 3 - Engine City" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

Mega-years of happy and fertile intellectual intercourse followed.
Towards the end of the Cretaceous period, alien ships emerged from nowhere. Their
occupants were warm-blooded, eight-limbed, eight-eyed, and furry. Celestial minds were
already familiar phenomena to them. They swarmed across the Solar System, cracking
memetic and genetic codes as they went. They talked to the gods with their noisy radio
systems, gibber, jabber, boasting in technical detail of the lightspeed drive and the
antigravity engine. Their discoid skiffs scooted through the skies of all the planets. They
flashed banks of lights at the kraken schools. They listened to the collective voice of the
Martian biosphere, which in all its long dying never rose above a sad, rusty croak.
They made friends. They found a promising species of small, bipedal, tailless dinosaurs
and fiddled with their genes. The new saurs were intelligent and long-lived. The octopods
taught the saurs how to fly skiffs. (Gaia took the saurs and skiffs into her dreams, and
spun shining images of them in plasma and ball lightning, but nobody noticed back then.)
They dangled the prospect of space travel before the kraken. Many of the squids pounced
at the chance. The octopods designed ships and skiffs; the saurs built them and flew the
skiffs; the krakens embraced the algorithms of interstellar navigation. Long ships, whose
pilots swam in huge aquaria, blinked away.
By this time, one thought in the baffled minds of the gods resonated from one side of the
Oort cloud to the other: KEEP THE NOISE DOWN! The radiation noise and the endless
blether of information were not the worst irritations. Despite all appeals, the octopods
persisted in digging on the surfaces of asteroids and comets. They itched like nits. Some
saurs and kraken began to see the godsтАЩ point of view, but they were unable to convince
the octopods. The cometary minds made small, cumulative changes in their orbits,
nudging a metallic asteroid onto a trajectory that ended on the octopodsтАЩ single city and
brought the Cretaceous epoch to a cataclysmic close.
The destruction appalled even the gods. The octopods and their allies fled, while the saurs
and krakens who remained behind labored to repair the damage done. They still had
skiffs and ships. Laden with rescued specimens and genetic material, light-speed ships
traveled to the other side of the galaxy. The saurs selected a volume about two hundred
light-years across and seeded scores of terrestrial planetsтАФsome hastily and blatantly
terraformedтАФwith the makings of new biospheres. Saurs and kraken settled the new
planets, originally as ecological engineering teams, later as colonists. Others returned to
the Solar System, to bring more species. The traffic was to continue for the next sixty-
five million years.
Echoes and rumors of other conflicts circulated around the galaxy. The kraken picked
them up from the gods in the newly settled systems and passed them on to the saurs. In
those multiple translations, subtleties were lost. Knowledge of the past became tradition,
then religion. Gradually, the saurs, in what they came to call the Second Sphere, diverged
from those in the Solar System. Meetings between the two branches of the species
became mute, and matings sterile.
In the Second Sphere, a quiet and contented civilization was held together by the kraken-
navigated starships that plied between its suns. It assimilated new arrivals at intervals of
centuries. Some fast, bright mammals increasingly reminded the saurs of the octopods.
Lemurs and lorises, apes and monkeys, successive species of hominid; bewildered,
furious bands of hunters, tribes of farmers, villages of artisans, caravans of missing
merchants, legions of the lost. The saursтАЩ patient answers to their frequently asked
questions became the catechism of a rational but zealous creed. Yes, the gods live in the
sky. No, they do not listen to prayers. No, they do not tell us what to do. Their first and
last commandment is: Do not disturb us.
Slowly, with the help of the saurs and the two other surviving species of hominid, the