"Ian McDonald - Verthandi's Ring" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

VERTHANDIтАЩS RING
IAN MCDONALD



B
ritish author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and
an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then
he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, AsimovтАЩs Science Fiction, New
Worlds, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing, and elsewhere. He was nominated for the
John W Campbell Award in 1985, and in 1989 he won the Locus Best First Novel
Award for his novel Desola-tion Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992
for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels
Out on Blue Six and Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools,
EvolutionтАЩs Shore, Kirinya, a chapbook novella, TendeleoтАЩs Story, Ares Express,
and Cyberabad, as well as two collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams and
Speaking in Tongues. His most recent novel, River of Gods, was a finalist for both
the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2005, and a novella drawn from
it, тАЬThe Little Goddess,тАЭ was a finalist for the Hugo and the Nebula. Coming up is
another new novel, Brasyl. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has
spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast. He has
a website at http://www.lysator.liu.se/^unicorn/mcdonald/.

In the brilliant story that follows, one with enough dazzling idea content
crammed densely into it to fuel many another authorтАЩs eight-hundred-page novel, he
shows us that total war between competing interstellar races will be slow and bloody
and vast, and, wellтАФtotal. With no room left in the galaxyтАФor even the
universeтАФfor the losing side.

****

After thirteen subjective minutes and five hundred and twenty-eight years, the Clade
battleship Ever-Fragrant Perfume of Divinity returned to the dying solar system.
The Oort cloud web pulled the crew off; skating around the gravity wells of hot fat
gas giants and the swelling primary, the battleship skipped out of the system at thirty
percent light-speed into the deep dark. Small, fast, cheap, the battleships were
disposable: a football of construc-tion nanoprocessors and a pload crew of three
embedded in the heart of a comet, a comet it would slowly consume over its half
millennium of flight. So cheap and nasty was this ship that it was only given a name
because the crew got bored five (subjective) minutes into the slow-time simulation of
Sofreendi desert monasticism that was their preferred combat interface.

The Oort cloud web caught the crew, shied them to the construction yards
skeined through the long, cold loops of the cometary halo, which flicked them in a
stutter of light-speed to the Fat Gas Giant relay point, where the eight hundred
habitats of the new Clade daughter fleet formed a pearl belly chain around the planet;
then to the Cladal Heart-world her-self, basking in the coronal energies of the senile,
grasping, swollen sun, and finally into fresh new selves.

тАЬHi guys, weтАЩre back,тАЭ said the crew of Ever-Fragrant Perfume as they