"Sea Change, With Monsters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

УDonТt take sides,Ф Indira said.
УIТm not. IТm trying to be realistic. Kids go down there all the time. They like staring out into the dark.Ф
УShe dresses like a Ring smuggler. Those lights in her hairЕФ
УAll the kids her age dress like that. They get it from the sagas. ItТs harmless.Ф
УWhy are you so fucking reasonable?Ф
УItТs a talent I have.Ф
Indira snuggled closer to him. They had just made love, and were both sweating on the big bed, beneath a simulated starscape. Carr liked to keep their room warm and humid. Bamboos and ferns and banana plants surrounded them. The walls were set to show misty distances above a moonlit rainforest. Carr had been born on Earth. His family had migrated from Greater Brazil to Europa a few years before the Quiet War. He was one of the ecological maintenance team of the city; once upon a time, he would have been called a gardener. He was a strong, solid, dependable man. He and Indira had been a couple for nine years now; several months ago, they had started to buy tickets in the child lottery for the second time.
Carr said, УI think itТs nice that she wants to make gardens under the ice. A little bit of me, a little bit of you. Did she show you her drawings?Ф
УOf course she did. Once we had made up after the argument about her going down to the service levels. All those friendly crabs and fish.Ф
Carr stretched luxuriously and asked the bedТs treacher for a glass of water. УCitrus, fizzy, ice.Ф He told Indira, УShe wants to think that one day there might be a world without monsters.Ф He took a sip of water. He said, УShe wants to be a gengineer.Ф
УShe wanted to be a tractor driver last week.Ф
УThat was two months ago. She has been asking all sorts of questions about gengineering. She asked me why there werenТt any fish out there in the ocean. You know, I think sometimes she tells me things because she knows IТll tell you.Ф
УSheТs smart.Ф
Carr sipped his water. After a while he saidТ УWhy do you have to go away so soon?Ф
УBecause of a monster. One of the angry fish Alice wants to replace with happy, smiling fish.Ф
УThere are other hunters.Ф
УYou knew what I did when we met, Carr. That hasnТt changed. And we need the money to pay for the lottery tickets.Ф
Carr put his water down and folded his arms around her. The hand which had held the glass was cool on her flank. He said, УI didnТt even know there was a nunnery on Europa.Ф
УItТs a monastery. For monks. Male nuns. Vlad was a bit vague about them and I canТt find anything about them on the net. TheyТre some kind of Christians, but not of any of the mainstream sects.Ф
УWhatever. Tell me again why they canТt kill this monster for themselves.Ф
УI think they tried.Ф A silence. She took a deep breath and said, УI havenТt told you everything, and itТs only fair that you know. Vlad thinks it might be a dragon.Ф
Carr said, УTheyТre extinct, arenТt they?Ф
УThe last time one was killed was over ten years ago. No one has seen one since. But absence of evidenceЧФ
УЧis not evidence of absence. So Vlad the Impaler wants to send you out against a dragon all by yourself.Ф
УWeТre not certain it is a dragon. And I wonТt exactly be alone. There will be the monks.Ф

Indira had met Vlad Simonov almost twenty years before, just after the end of the Quiet War. She had been a construction diver then, helping build the cityТs first weed farm. Biowar macroforms were getting past the sonar and electrical barriers that were supposed to keep them away from the cityТs underside, and Vlad had been hired to clear out a nest of urchins. The things had learned to passively drift through the barriers on currents and reactivate in the lights of the construction site. They were etching away support pylons, and in those days there were still a few of the kind of urchin that manufactured explosives in their cores. Two construction divers had been killed.
Indira volunteered to assist Vlad, and they quickly located the place where the urchins were breeding. It was five kilometers east of the weed farm, downstream of the currents driven by the upwelling plume. It was an area of rotten ice eroded by the relatively warm water of the upwelling, riddled with caves and crevices and halfcollapsed tunnels, rich in precipitated sulfides. Indira didnТt panic when urchins started dropping out of crevices in the ice. They seemed like harmless toys, spiny, fistsized black balls that wobbled this way and that on pulsed jets of water. She forgot that some could be carrying explosive charges and coolly and methodically killed them with neurotoxintipped flechettes, not wasting a shot. Afterward, Vlad said that he liked her style, and that evening they got drunk together to celebrate their victory. She thought no more about it, but a few weeks later he called her up to ask if she would like to help out again.
The gengineered biowar macroforms had been delivered to EuropaТs ocean by penetrator probes during the Quiet War. Viruses had destroyed the food yeasts (and incidentally had caused the extinction of the indigenous microbes that had lived around the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean); the macroforms had wrecked the yeast reactors, the mines and the cargo submarines, the heat exchangers and the tidal generators.
Earth had not expected to win the Quiet War quickly. The Three Powers Occupying Force had no plans to decommission the monsters they had set loose, and no one knew how many there were now. They reproduced by parthenogenesis, like certain insects, and they had contained dormant embryos when they had been released. Hunters like Vlad Simonov were the only reliable line of defense against their depredations.
The second job was against a mako that had been systematically destroying mine intakes at Taliesin. Vlad and Indira spent a dozen hours hanging by the probe of one intake, following it as, like a giant articulated proboscis, it moved this way and that in the black water, tracking mineralrich currents. The mako came in hard and fast out of the darkness, straight at Indira. She held steady and Vlad hit it with his second shot. Afterward, he offered her a permanent job, and she accepted.
She discovered a talent for killing. She got no pleasure from it, except to do it as cleanly and professionally as possible, and it did not diminish the guilt she felt because she had survived the Quiet War and her parents had not. Only time did that. But she was good at killing monsters. She cleaned out hundreds of urchin nests, destroyed infestations of fireworms that had wrapped themselves around electrical cables and caused crippling overvoltages, went up against and killed makos and mantas and spinners. But she had never before had to face a dragon, the smartest and most dangerous of all the monsters.

Indira took the railway west from Phoenix, along Phineus Linea to Cadmus. The scarp stood to the north, an endless fault wall half a kilometer high. It was one of the highest features of EuropaТs flat surface. Mottled terrain stretched away to the south, textured by small hills and cut by numerous dikes and fracture lines. Lobes of brown and grey ice flows were fretted by sublimation and lightly spattered with small craters. This was one of the oldest landscapes of Europa. The ice here was almost five kilometers thick.
It was early morning, four hours after sunrise. EuropaТs day was exactly the length of its orbit around Jupiter, and so, from any point on EuropaТs sub-jovian hemisphere, Jupiter hung in the same spot in the sky, waxing and waning through the eightyfive hour day. At present, Jupiter was completely dark, a glowering circular black hole in the sky that was nearly thirty times as big as EarthТs moon. Indira was in the trainТs observation car, sipping iced peach tea and watching the beginning of the dayТs eclipse. It would last three hours, and was the nearest thing to true night on the subjovian hemisphere, for when the Sun set, Jupiter was full, and there was almost always one or more of the other three Galilean moons in the sky.
There was a sudden flash of light that briefly defined JupiterТs lower edge as the diamond point of the Sun disappeared behind it. Darkness swept across the ice plain; stars suddenly bestrode the sky in their rigid patterns. As her eyes adapted, Indira could make out the flicker of a lightning storm near the upper edge of JupiterТs black discЧa storm bigger than Europa.
Indira talked with Carr. She talked with Alice and told her what she could see, and tried to patch up the row theyТd had.
УCarr misses you already,Ф Alice said. She was on one of the slideways of the cityТs commercial center. УHe says heТs going to change your room. ItТs a surprise.Ф She didnТt want to talk about her project. When Indira tried to press her about it, she said, УI have to go. This is where I should be.Ф
The train was full of miners. They were all flying on some drug or other. This was their last chance to get high before they returned to work. They were native Europans, originally from South Africa. They wore leather jackets and fancy hightopped boots over pressure suit liners. One of them played a slow blues on a steelbodied guitar; another, egged on by his comrades, tried to chat up Indira. He was a young man, tall and very handsome, with very black skin and chiseled cheekbones. He spent more time looking at his reflection in the diamond window of the observation car, ghosting over the speeding, starlit landscape, than he did looking at Indira. His name was Champion Khumalo. Indira thought that it was a nickname, but no, all his friends had names like that, or names out of the Bible. Trinity Adepoju. Gospel Motloheloa. Ruth and Isaac Mahlungu.
Once Champion gave up his halfhearted attempt to sweettalk Indira, they all became friends. Indira learnt that two of ChampionТs brothers went to the same school as Alice. They passed around a bottle of pear brandy and tubes of something called haze. It smelt sharply of ketones and delivered an immediate floating feeling of bonhomie.
The miners were fascinated by her profession. УTo clean all the ocean of monsters,Ф Gospel Motloheloa said, Уis a noble calling!Ф
УWell, I donТt see why we need to go into the world below,Ф Isaac Mahlungu said. I have been a miner for thirty years and I have never needed to go there. This is our land, the world all around us.Ф
УBut the ocean is part of our world,Ф Gospel said. She was the oldest of the miners. Her irongrey hair was done up in medusa ropes wound with plastic wire. There were keloid scars on her forehead; because they spent their working lives on the surface, most miners suffered from radiationinduced cancers. She said, УThe ocean makes the land what it is, and so it is important to get rid of the monsters that infest it.Ф
УThe monsters are from Earth,Ф Trinity Adepoju said. УThatТs why we have to get rid of them.Ф He was the guitar player, a tall man even for a Europan, with a ready smile and fingers so long they seemed to have several extra joints as he moved them idly up and down the neck of his guitar.
Indira remembered a conversation she had once had with Alice. She had been trying to explain to her daughter why Earth had won the Quiet War.
УThey have more wealth, more processing power, more people. They have used up their world and now they want to use up all the others.Ф
УThen well have to do things they canТt,Ф Alice had said, so solemnly that Indira had laughed.
Champion said, УEven with the monsters gone, we will still live on EarthТs sufferance.Ф
His friends nodded, and began to tell Indira their war stories. Many of the miners had been on Europa throughout the Quiet War. Although the population of the capital, then called Minos (the miners called it that still), had at last been evacuated to Ganymede, the miners had been left in their camps. Most had managed to synthesize enough oxygen from water ice, but there had not been enough food.
УWe were so hungry,Ф Gospel told Indira, Уthat we were thinking of eating our boots at the end of it.Ф