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

Basic said, "The boogers accepted their fate. Only single-celled bacteria and algae survived their great
winter. Those were our ancestors. Everything else died out."

"Except maybe the Ediacara," Port said.

"We can never prove that," Slash said.

Port told Echo, "The Ediacara were this very weird group of multicellular animals that were around just
after the end of the Precambrium -- at the end of the boogers' great winter. They were nothing like any
other known phylum -- those evolved later, in the so-called Cambrium explosion which gave birth to
every modern multicellular phylum. The Ediacara could be a relic of the boogers' epoch. They could have
survived around hydrothermal vents."

"But we'll never know," Slash said.

"And we'll never not know either," Port said, glaring at him.

Basic told Echo, "The soldiers wanted us to find records of technology that could be used against the
Copernicus Alliance, but there's nothing like that here."

"It's no more than a greeting," Syntax said. "A message sent into the future in case intelligent life evolved
again. The boogers didn't think like us. They accepted that life was a precarious thing, able to exist only
in those interstices of a planet's history between catastrophic events. They were fatalists."

"I think they were a lot like us," Basic said. "People put messages from Earth on early deep space probes
like Pioneer and Voyager. Those were sent into interstellar space rather than the future, but the intention
was exactly the same."

"In the end it doesn't matter," Port told Echo. "We can't get out of here."

"When the soldiers realize that there's nothing useful here they'll kill us," Slash said, "but they'll let you
live."

"Nothing useful?" Echo laughed, and tasted blood from his split lips. "You're thinking like soldiers. I don't
blame you. The soldiers took over long ago. We all think like them now, and all we think about is
survival."

"You're working for the soldiers," Slash said. "Don't deny it. You're a spy. That's why you were sent
here."

"My brother and sisters are all soldiers," Echo said. "All of them are ashamed that I became a tech, but
my oldest brother took it personally. That's why he sent me here. He wanted me to do a soldier's job
because that might make me into a soldier. But once you've been made over into a tech that's what you
are."

Echo tapped his head. "At first you run the programs, but pretty soon they start running you. It's the same
with soldiers. They can't help what they are because they were made that way, but it's our fault that we
let them take over. I looked up the records once. Hardly anyone does that now. We're too focused on
the present, on survival. In the last two hundred years the proportion of soldiers increased every time
we've gone to war against another base, and remained at the same level high after the war ended, until