"Paul J. McAuley - Reef" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

REEF
Paul J. McAuley
Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London.
A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984, and has gone on
to be a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Amazing, The
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, AsimovтАЩs Science Fiction, When the MusicтАЩs
Over, and elsewhere.
McAuley is considered to be one of the best of the new breed of British writers
(although a few Australian writers could be fit in under this heading as well) who are
producing that brand of rigorous hard science fiction with updated modem and
stylistic sensibilities that is sometimes referred to as тАЬradical hard science fictionтАЭ, but
he also writes Dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future, and he
also is one of the major young writers who are producing that revamped and retooled
wide-screen Space Opera that has sometimes been called the New Baroque Space
Opera, reminiscent of the Superscience stories of the thirties taken to an even higher
level of intensity and scale. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the
Philip K. Dick Award, and his acclaimed novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C.
Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His other books include the
novels Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and PasqualeтАЩs Angel, two collections of his short
work, The King of the Hill and Other Stories and The Invisible Country, and an
original anthology coedited with Kim Newman, In Dreams. His most recent books are
Child of the River, Ancient of Days, and Shrine of Stars, which comprise a major new
trilogy of ambitious scope and scale, Confluence, set ten million years in the future.
Currently he is working on a new novel, Life on Mars.
In the suspenseful and inventive story that follows, he suggests that itтАЩs not
necessarily enough to find life in the outer reaches of the Solar SystemтАФyou also need
someone whoтАЩll be willing to fight to preserve itтАж
****
MARGARET HENDERSON Wu was riding a proxy by telepresence deep inside
Tigris Rift when Dzu Sho summoned her. The others in her crew had given up one by
one and only she was left, descending slowly between rosy, smoothly rippled cliffs
scarcely a hundred metres apart. These were pavements of the commonest vacuum
organism, mosaics made of hundreds of different strains of the same species. Here and
there bright red whips stuck out from the pavement; a commensal species that
deposited iron sulphate crystals within its integument. The pavement seemed to
stretch endlessly below her. No probe or proxy had yet reached the bottom of Tigris
Rift, still more than thirty kilometres away. Microscopic flecks of sulfur-iron
complexes, sloughed cells and excreted globules of carbon compounds and other
volatiles formed a kind of smog or snow, and the vacuum organisms deposited nodes
and intricate lattices of reduced metals that, by some trick of superconductivity,
produced a broad band electromagnetic resonance that pulsed like a giantтАЩs slow
heartbeat.
All this futzed the telepresence link between operators and their proxies. One
moment Margaret was experiencing the three-hundred-and twenty-degree panorama
of the little proxyтАЩs microwave radar, the perpetual tug of vacuum on its mantle, the
tang of extreme cold, a mere thirty degrees above absolute zero, the complex taste of
the vacuum smog (burnt sugar, hot rubber, tar), the minute squirts of hydrogen from
the folds of the proxyтАЩs puckered nozzle as it maintained its orientation relative to the
cliff face during its descent, with its tentacles retracted in a tight ball around the relay
piton. The next, she was back in her cradled body in warm blackness, phosphenes