"Will McCarthy - Bloom" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

"The Louis Pasteur," he said. "You may have heard about it here and there; the program is being
accelerated in a big way. Ship is designed for inner system operation; high-temperature, high-radiation,
also the t-balance hullтАФtheoretically bloomproof. But of course, ha ha, we're not going to test that here
on Ganymede. The only way to test it is to fly it down there, into the Mycosystem, and see if anything
eats it. We hope to do that soon, and if the testing goes well, we'll fly it all the way down to Earth and
Mars and Luna. The thinking goes: Even in the inner system, there are places too cold, dark, barren for
mycora to bloom. If any serious cold-weather adaptations start appearing, the first signs of it will
probably be there. So we drop a few detectors on some polar caps, and suddenly nobody's bothering us
about this problem anymore. Not unless the detectors start screaming at us, which I don't think is going
to happen."

"Are these state secrets?" I asked, turning to look at his face. "Can I talk about this stuff?"

His look was disapproving. "There are no secrets, Mr. Strasheim. There's barely any state, and I didn't
invite you up here to waste your time. If we didn't want you to talk about this, what would we want you
for? To make shoes? You have skills which nobody else in the Immunity seems to possess. You're a
commentator, an historian; you record simple facts in a way that's accessible to the public, even
entertaining. That ability could be very useful for this project, if you're willing to lend it to us for a while."

"It sounds fascinating," I said sincerely. "I take it you want me to write an article?"

Lottick looked at me like I was somewhat stupider than he'd been expecting. "No, son. I thought we
understood each other. I want you to go on the mission."

Two

WOMBS
Weightless in the solitude of a ballista car, I pondered. Thought of tunnels arching through the planet, of
the cars being fired through them like signals through an optic-fiber network. Of cavern cities and
macroimmune systems and the nearly million people who comprised the only society I'd ever really
known. I was eleven when we left the Earth.

I keep the lights off when I'm cannonballing, at least when I'm doing it alone, so there was nothing around
me but the sound-absorbing padding of the walls, neither seen nor felt. The iconified images on my
zee-spec might well have been the only light in the universe. I studied them.

Lottick had indeed hit the highlights in his brief speech. Under some unknown set of conditions, mycora
could absorb (scan? hack?) immunophages by an unknown process, and transcribe and adopt data gene
sequences despite the supposed incompatibility of same. So little was understood about the phenomenon
that the info packet, despite its reams of supporting data, occupied me for only about twenty minutes.
Anyway, I was no doctor, and most of the jargon went right past me, leaving little more information than
Lottick had given me verbally. Of more interest was the data on the ship itself; Louis Pasteur was at
heart a light cargo ship, ladderdown-powered and capable of extended voyage at interplanetary
velocities, though the mass of the "t-balance" hull coatings did cut into performance a bit. Normally
crewed by four to five people, these ships, though Pasteur her self would carry six. Or seven, if I agreed
to join them.

And that was the question, now, wasn't it? Could I do that, leave Ganymede behind, leave the whole
Immunity behind to dive back into the warmth of the inner system? Protected from the mycora only by an