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

a rush of reeking gas, a terrifying drop closer to the fanged mouths of the forest:
another balloon had failed. Harvest Moon, incarnated without feet or wheels, for her
species was never intended to touch the ground, turned lazy circles in the sky.

тАЬSame again?тАЭ Scented Coolabar asked. Rose of Jericho spoke through
radio-sense into her head.

тАЬOf course.тАЭ
 Foolish of Scented Coolabar to imagine a Rose of Jericho game being ended
so simply or so soon.

тАЬThe Deep Blue Something has worked it out.тАЭ

тАЬI should hope so.тАЭ The balloon cluster was failing, sinking fast. With the
unaided eye Scented Coolabar could see the lash-worms and bladed dashers racing
along the sucker-studded tentacles of the forest canopy. This round of the game was
almost ended. She hoped her ornithopter was smart enough to realize the imminent
danger.

тАЬAnd VerthandiтАЩs Ring?тАЭ Harvest Moon asked.

тАЬIs a remnant superstring.тАЭ A subquantal fragment of the original big-bang
fireball, caught by cosmic inflation and stretched to macroscopic, then to
Cosmological scale. Rarer than virtue or phoenixes, remnant superstrings haunted
the galactic fringes and the vast spaces between star spirals; tens, hundreds of
light-years long. In all the CladeтАЩs memory, only one had ever been recorded within
the body of the galaxy. Until now. тАЬTied into a loop,тАЭ Rose of Jericho added.
Scented Coolabar and Harvest Moon understood at once. Only the hand of the
EnemyтАФif the Enemy possessed such things, no communication had ever been
made with them, no physical trace ever found from the wreckage of their ships or
their vaporized colony clus-tersтАФcould have attained such a thing. And that was
why the Chamber of Ever-Renewing Waters had launched the Heart-world. Such a
thing could only be an ultimate weapon.

But what does it do? Scented Coolabar and Harvest Moon asked at once, but
the presence in their brains, one humanesque, one man-bat-glider, was gone. Game
over. A new round beginning. With a shriek of alarm, the or-nithopter cast free just
in time to avoid the tendrils creeping up over the canopies of the few surviving
balloons. The tentacles of the forest clasped those of the balloon cluster and hauled
it down. Then the blades came out.

****

How do wars begin? Through affront, through bravado, through stupidity or
overconfidence, through sacred purpose or greed. But when galactic cultures fight, it
is out of inevitability, out of a sense of cosmic tragedy. It is through understanding
of a simple evolutionary truth: there can be only one exploiter of an ecological niche,
even if that niche is the size of a universe. Within milliseconds of receiving the
inquisitive touch of the Hujjain probe, the Enemy realized this truth. The vaporizing
of the probe was the declaration of war, and would have given the Enemy centuries