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

I fell asleep writing that. I hope you stayed awake readнing it. And I see I have told you nothing that I meant to tell you. Now I have more, and I have to catch up.

So: I walked back out of the copse to the estate, made over my business pro tem to my three-quarter-sister (I'm checking up on you, Magnetic Resonance Gale, don't think I'm not), said goodbye to my caremother, and took the train to the forward wall. Just beнfore it entered the wall it passed through a valley between two trash mountains. Never having looked at them up close, I was surprised (though I shouldn't have been) to find that the trash isn't just raw junk and clinker: you can see ruins in it, pipework, walls and spires, the rubble of cities built when there was less room in the world. Huge machines crawl over it like crabs, breaking the junk down small enough to chuck into the service lifts to the drive. I got out at a long, low-ceilinged station and after checking directions and assignments and a bit of hanging about while the rest of the contingent straggled in, took the lift to the upper levels. It was a much bigger lift than the one Constantine had taken me to, and the journey took about an hour. There were thirty other passengers, all of them booked for the same training habitat as myself. I hadn't wanted to train with people I knew, and in this I've certainly been successful. I didn't know any of them. What I hadn't expected was that no one else I was with would have had the same idea. So the rest all know each other, or rather, they're in two cliques from two estates, New Lamarck and Long Steading, adjaнcent to each other and distant from mine, Big Foot. (Does that name come from its once having been at the foot of a big ladder? Very likely; back when the esнtates were construction camps, their naming was quite arbitrary.)

The New Lamarck clique are into somatic hacks, some of them in questionable taste. But I'll take their plumed scalps and cats' eyes and particoloured skin any day over the Long Steading crowd's conspicuous conformity. (If any of them are reading this, which I doubt, I make no apologies. I've told you this to your faces.) What they are into is each other. Their plan is to train together, homestead together and become a founder population together. There's already at least one triple among them. That is just disgusting. It is beнhaving like old people.

Anyway, none of them talked to me on the way up, or in the scooter. I was first out of the airlock at the habitat. I emerged into the big bubble of air; it conнtained two roughly spherical objects, the air-tree and the rock. The sunline burned above, the downward view was dizzying, but my childhood experience, brief though it was, of free fall came back to me. I wasn't disoriented. A guide-rope snaked from the airlock to the air-tree. Holding it, waiting to greet us, was Horrocks Mathematical.

He's tallЧor rather, long. About two metres from his heels to the top of his head, and a good half-metre more if you were to measure from his toes to the top of his hair. His hands are long too. Like his feet, they proнtruded bare from his red one-piece coverall. His hair is long and in numerous braids. Brown skin, blue eyes, angular features. It was sorely evident that he's not six years older than most of us.

He waved, smiled, and beckoned us along the rope. I had some idea of how to handle myself, and kept close behind his feet, which waved in front of me like a skin diver's. The others did a lot of giggling and screaming and fooling around, or so it sounded. I disнdained to look back. At the entrance to the tree Horrocks turned around, and shook hands with everyone as they passed him. Then we all followed Horrocks through the branches and into the tree. Its interior space was crisscrossed with lianas and with branches extended and shaped to a clutter of grown furnishings: hoops of wood to put your legs through, flat tables, handholds, complex storage spaces, sleeping pods, a few opaque cylindrical chambers that I guessed were privies; and with optical and plastic tubing and modiнfied leaves or nuts that formed translucent skins for great wobbling spheres of water.

Horrocks darted to the centre of the tree's interior space and we all clustered around him, clutching variнous handholds or leg-hoops. It was in a leg-hoop that I sat, my arms hooked over the upper part, my pack looped to my wrist. Horrocks himself just hung there in the air, now and then twisting or somersaulting to vary his address.

"Welcome," he began, "and thank you all again for choosing my habitat. We'll be here for a week or so. This tree is a typical first-generation home, nothing too elaborate. It's a lot more comfortable than a free-fall construction shack, but we'll get on to that in due course. For now, the main thing you have to learn is how to work in free fall, how to work in vacuum, and how to operate the machines..."

He went on for a bit, telling us what we were going to do, and then we suited up and went out and started to do it. We weren't in vacuum, of course; the main reason for the suits was to acquaint us with their use, and secondarily to protect us from the dust thrown off by the machines. There's no point in describing it all; you'll either have done it, in which case it'll be boring, or you haven't, in which case you won't understand. What I want to talk about is why we do it, because, as I huddle here with my muscles aching, I wonder too. Everybody who plans to homestead does basic trainнing. It's customary, yes, but that doesn't explain it. Why are we doing things ourselves that could be done, and that we hope eventually to see done, by automata? Nobody has told me. So I have figured it out. It's like camping. It builds character.


14364:06:1922:21

Having thought about it further, I now understand that it has much more to do with how far away we are from anyone else. We are four hundred years from help and four information-years (hence eight or more elapsed years, counting question, turnaround, and answer) from advice. Our automata are the result of generaнtions of iteration: long enough for source code to muнtate. The Destiny Star system will likely contain molecules no one has encountered before. Some of them could burn our machinery. Accidents happen.

So we have to be ready to work, with digging and forging tools, in free fall and raw vacuum, in space suits, just like primitive man. We all have to become like the Moon Cave People, for a while when we are very young, so that in an emergency we can be as tough and self-reliant as they were.

Oh yes. Why I hate Horrocks Mathematical:

We had just come off shift the first night and we were all brewing and cooking, and the others were all talking in their two little cliques. Horrocks turned up beside me. I offered him tea and he took it.

"I like your biolog," he said. " 'Learning the World.' "

My ears burned. "You read it?"

"Now and again."

He looked away, squirting the teabulb straight into his mouth. I still couldn't do that without scalding.

"Constantine?" he went on. "You know who he is?"

"No," I said. I bit some berrybread. Crumbs floated. I tried to avoid inhaling any; scooping them was diffiнcult, like catching flies: they danced away from my finнgers. "It's funny, I never tried looking him up, even in memory. I suppose when you're a child some things seem like a dream."

"I suppose they do," said Horrocks, looking amused for no reason I could discern. "And your caremother didn't tell you about him?"

"No," I said. "What about him?" I resented the tone of querulous suspicion in my voice.

"He's one of your geneparents," said Horrocks. "Your half-father, in fact. That's why he was so solicitious of you."

I said and did nothing for a minute. I must have squeezed a bulb too hard; tea floated past my face in little hot drops.