"Ken Macleod - Fall Revolution 3 - The Cassini Division" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

 тАЬYou donтАЩt need it to fight the Outwarders.тАЭ
тАЬIsnтАЩt that for us to judge?тАЭ
Wilde nodded. тАЬSure. You make your judgements, and IтАШll make mine.тАЭ
I wanted to shake the answer out of him. I would have had no compunction about it. As far as I
was concerned, he wasnтАЩt a human being, just a clever copy of one.
I also, paradoxically, wished I could regard him as a fellow human, as a neighbour. This just
served to increase my frustration. If I could have taken Wilde into my confidence, and let him
know just how bad, how fast, things were going, he might very well have agreed to tell me all I
needed to know. But the Division trusted him even less than he trusted us. Telling him the full
truth might trigger things far, far worse. Wilde and Meg had both been in the hands of the enemy,
were quite literally products of the enemy, and even now we werenтАЩt one hundred per cent
confident that they were or were only what they claimed, and seemed, to be. I thought for a
moment of what it might be like if we ever had to treat them as an outbreak and hit them with an
orbital zap. There would be no warning, no evacuation, no last-minute work for the ecologists.
The monkey-thing bounded from MegтАЩs lap to mine. I let it scurry up my arm and nestle on my
shoulder, and smoothed out the lap of my skirt. I looked up.
тАЬThatтАЩs fine,тАЭ I said. тАЬItтАЩs up to you.тАЭ I shrugged, the false animalтАЩs false fur brushing my
cheek. тАЬYou do what seems best.тАЭ I stood up and smiled at them both.
For a moment Wilde looked nonplussed. I hoped heтАЩd be so thrown off balance by my lack of
persistence that he would change his mind. But the ploy didnтАЩt work. I would have to go for the
second option: more difficult, more perilous and, if anything, less likely to succeed.
тАЬGoodbye,тАЭ I said. тАЬSee you around.тАЭ
In hell, probably.
I leaned over the guardrail around the roof of the Casa Azores and looked down. The ground
was a thousand metres below. I felt no vertigo. IтАЩve climbed taller trees. There were lights along
the beach, bobbing boats in front of the beach, then a breakwater; and beyond that, blue-green
fields of algae, fish-farms and kelp plantations and ocean thermal-energy converters, all the way to
the horizon. Airships whether on night-work or recreation I didnтАЩt know drifted like silvery
bubbles above them. The building itself, although in the middle of all this thermal power, drew its
electricity from a different source. Technically the whole structure was a Carson Tower, powered
by cooled air from the top falling down a central shaft and turning turbines on the way.
It was cold on the roof. I turned away from the downward view, wrapped the bolero jacket
around my shoulders, and looked at the sky. Once my irises had adjusted, I could see Jupiter,
among the clutter of orbital factories, mirrors, lightsails, satellites, and habitats. With binoculars, I
could have seen Callisto, Io, Europa and the ring. It was as good a symbol as any of the forces we
were up against.
Our enemies, by some process which even after two centuries was, as we say, not well
understood, had disintegrated JupiterтАЩs largest moon, Ganymede, to leave that ring of hurrying
debris and worrying machinery. And originally within the ring, but now well outside it was
something even more impressive and threatening: a sixteen-hundred-metre-wide gap in space-time,
a wormhole gate to the stars.
Two centuries ago, the Outwarders people like ourselves, who scant years earlier had been
arguing politics with us in the sweaty confines of primitive space habitats had become very much
not like us: post-human, and superhuman. Men Like Gods, like. The Ring was their work, as was
the Gate.
 After these triumphs, nemesis. Their fast minds hit some limit in processing-speed, or attained
enlightenment, or perhaps simply wandered. Most of them distintegrated, others drifted into the
Jovian atmosphere, where they re-established some kind of contact with reality.
Their only contact with us, a few years later, was a burst of radioborne information viruses
which failed to take over, but managed to crash, every computer in the Solar System. The dark