"Learning The World" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

"I named it," said Constantine.

"Why did you call it that?" I asked.

He swung me and caught my other hand, like a dancer, and once again gazed into my face as if lookнing for something.

"You'll know one day," he said.

I know now.


Horrocks Mathematical blinked away the girl's biolog. It seemed that like all of the ship generation she was maturing on schedule. He himself had gone through adolescence, five or six years ago now, without any such epiphany. The Mathematical were tenth-generation crew and Horrocks had never had to suffer a grounded upbringing. Although born in the ship he did not conнsider himself or his cohort part of the ship generation. They were among the youngest members of the crew, that was all. Through the foliage of the air-tree and the skin of the bubble in which he floated he could see the land twenty-five kilometres belowЧits parks and copses, rivers and lakes, estates and towns an ideal of savannah and suburbia that was said to be a hard-wired part of the human evolutionary heritage, though only manifested among flatfooters. As a free-flyer, Horrocks felt that his was a more evolved biophilia.

The air-tree, growing from a hydroponic tank, its branches grafted to form an open wickerwork sphere, was about fifty metres in diameter and five years older than he was. Horrocks pushed through the lianas that crisscrossed its interior and thrust himself out into the greater confinement of the bubble. He had work to do. The bubble was one of scores strung on a circular caнble around the sunline like beads on a bangle. The caнble contra-rotated the ground, putting the bubbles in an approximation of free fall. Only the slight intermittent backward tug of the small jets that countered the effect of the ship's deceleration broke the spell, but that was all they broke.

On the other side of the bubble, making a rocky counterpart to the air-tree, hung a tethered lump of asнteroid clinker about a hundred metres across. A thrust of his feet took Horrocks towards it. As he drifted he tugged on his cuffs. The fabric slid over his hands and fingers, to form tough gloves by the time he impacted the rock's side. He worked his way over and around the rock, checking each of the scores of machines he'd spent the past few days bolting to its surface. They jutнted out a metre or so; their display and control panelsЧsome of them simple touch screens, others elaborate but rugged arrangements of knobs, push buttons, and dials, and a few remote brain interfacesЧwere already filmed or crusted with dust. All in order, however. The tenebrific shade had passed over him many times, and half the morning had passed, before he was satisfied with that.

Ready for the kids to play with. Horrocks tweaked a final bolt and took a deep breath. He pulled his collar up over his head and down over his face until it sealed under his chin, and launched himself towards the bubнble's airlock. The scooter on the other side of it took him, on a spiralling trajectory that would have dizzied and sickened a flatfooter, around and along the sunline to the airlock of the forward wall. Once inside, he pulled his hood off his face, gasped a couple of times, and relaxed into his own world, the world of the forнward cone.

Immediately the corner of his eye filled with mesнsages. It was not that they were unavailable outside, but that they were easier to ignore. He blinked through them rapidly, discarding most as routine. One from his friend Awlin Halegap, a speculator, urged him to check one of the latest observations of the new system into which the ship was decelerating.

Horrocks smiledЧAwlin's speculations were often indeed speculative, and had already cost Horrocks and other acquaintances almost as much credit as they had profited them in the last couple of yearsЧbut tuned in to the list anyway. Most of the observations were of the first tranche of asteroids detected, and of the moons of the ringed gas giant and the waterworld that were the most prominent bodies in the system, and a few of the planets. The one Awlin had tagged was of the least immediately usable of the planets: the habitable-zone terrestrial. When he expanded the data he could see nothing of note; its amount and resolution, from a distance of several light-hours, were sparse. He made contact with Awlin.

"What's the big deal?" Horrocks asked.

"Lightning spikes," replied Awlin.

"Thank you," said Horrocks. He concentrated on the section of the data on the relevant portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. There it was: a recurring surge of activity that suggested an agitated atmosphere, in which a great deal of interesting stuff was going on. Research claims on the planet were sure to become a lucrative proposition. So Awlin thought, at any rate.

Horrocks considered it for a moment, then patched to his broker and unloaded a hundred in waterworld phytochemicals for a thousand in terrestrials: blue-sky investments. As he worked his way through the capilнlaries of corridor to the main hollows he checked their progress by the minute. Their rating barely twitched. He sent a copy of the flat wavy line to Awlin, with a querying tic.

"See?" Awlin flashed back. "You got in ahead of the rush!"

Horrocks tried for a moment to compose a thinkable reply, gave up, and zapped a rude burst of static to the speculator. He hesitated over dropping the terrestrials, looking hard at his portfolio. His claims in mercurialsЧthe tiny planet near the sun might someday be a power-beam construction siteЧwere sound and edging upward. Bids were coming in for time on the training habitat he'd just completed. He could afford to gamble. He kept the claims.


2ЧAeronautical Research

Darvin placed his chin on the strap in front of him, and slid his feet into the stirrups behind him. The other straps of the harness pressed across his hips and the lower part of his rib cage. Ropes from all of them converged to a hook in the ceiling. The concrete floor was not far beneath him, but in this position it could be nothing but too close. He forced himself to look straight ahead at the blank concrete wall. The bright lights hurt his eyes. The glare was increased by reflection from the white paper sheets crisscrossed with black ribbon tapes tacked to the wall on his right.

"Comfortable?" Orro asked, from off to his left.

"No!"

"Too bad. Oh well." The Gevorkian made some minute adjustment to the tripod-mounted kinematographic apparatus over which he stooped. Apparently satisfied, he looked up with an encouraging grin and a thumbs-up. His other thumb was poised over the moнtor switch.

"Ready?"

Darvin stretched out his wings and folded back his ears.