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

тАЬAgain?тАЭ Harvest Moon asked.

тАЬAgain.тАЭ

****

In all the known universe, there was only the Clade. All life was part of it, it was all
life. Ten million years ago, it had been confined to a single species on a single
worldтАФa world not forgotten, for nothing was forgotten by the Clade. That world,
that system, had long since been transformed into a sphere of Heart-world orbiting a
sun-halo of computational entities, but it still remembered when the bright blue eye of
its home planet blinked once, twice, ten thousand times. Ships. Ships! Probe ships,
sail ships, fast ships, slow ships, seed ships, ice ships; whole asteroid colonies,
hollow-head comets, sent out on centuries-long falls toward other stars, other
worlds. Then, after the Third Evolution, pload ships, tiny splinters of quantum
computation flicked into the dark. In the first hundred thousand years of the CladeтАЩs
his-tory, a thousand worlds were settled. In the next hundred thousand, a hun-dred
times that. And a hundred and a hundred and a hundred; colony seeded colony
seeded colony, while the space dwellers, the Heart-world habitats and virtual pload
intelligences, filled up the spaces in between which, heart and truth, were the vastly
greater part of the universe. Relativistic ramships fast-tracked past lumbering arc
fleets; robot seed ships furled their sunsails and sprayed biospheres with life-juice;
terraforming squadrons hacked dead moons and hell-planets into nests for life and
intelligence and civilization. And species, already broken by the Second and Third
Evolutions into space-dwellers and ploads, shattered into culture dust. Subspecies,
new species, evo-lutions, devolutions; the race formerly known as humanity
blossomed into the many-petaled chrysanthemum of the Clade; a society on the
Cosmo-logical scale; freed from the deaths of suns and worlds, immune, immortal,
growing faster than it could communicate its gathered self-knowledge back to its
immensely ancient and powerful Type 4 civilizations; entire globular clusters turned
to hiving, howling quantum-nanoprocessors.

New species, subspecies, hybrid species. Life was profligate in the cosmos;
even multicellular life. The Clade incorporated DNA from a hundred thou-sand alien
biospheres and grew in richness and diversity. Intelligence alone was unique. In all its
One Giant Leap, the Clade had never encountered another bright with sentience and
the knowledge of its own mortality that was the key to civilization. The Clade was
utterly alone. And thus intel-ligence became the watchword and darling of the Clade:
intelligence, that counterentropic conjoined twin of information, must become the
most powerful force in the universe, the energy to which all other physical laws must
eventually kneel. Intelligence alone could defeat the heat-death of the universe, the
dark wolf at the long thin end of time. Intelligence was destiny, manifest.

And then a Hujjain reconnaissance probe, no bigger than the thorn of a rose
but vastly more sharp, cruising the edge of a dull little red dwarf, found a million
habitats pulled in around the stellar embers. When the Palaelogos of the Byzantine
Orthodoxy first encountered the armies of Islam crashing out of the south, he had
imagined them just another heretical Christian sect. So had the Hujjain probe
doubted; then, as it searched its memory, the entire history of the Clade folded into