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

Ruth Mahlungu said, УWhat are you talking about, woman! You are so vain that you would starve to death and be buried in your boots rather than eat them!Ф
The others laughed. It was true: GospelТs boots were extraordinary, even for a miner, green suede decorated with intricate patterns made from little bits of mirror and red and gold thread.
There were stories of cannibalism. Several camps had been vaporized by the nuclear device that had broken through the crust to allow the penetrators containing the biowar organisms to reach the ocean. This was at Tyre Macula, on EuropaТs antijovian hemisphere. Although the area had been lightly populated, the blast had killed more than a hundred miners and had left a flat plain of radioactive ice and radial grooves hundreds of kilometers long: a bright sunburst scar on EuropaТs mottled brown face.
Indira had heard all these stories before; it seemed that Europans would never tire of telling and retelling stories about the war. She had stories of her own, but they were all too sad to bear telling. The death of her family, the two years she had spent as an orphaned refugee on Ganymede. At last, she managed to steer the conversation to the monastery.
Champion grinned. УYouТre going there? ThatТs a good joke!Ф
The miners exchanged words in a language full of glottal clicks. They all laughed, but the young miner would not tell Indira what they found funny.
УTheyТre very rich there, those people,Ф Champion said. УThey have a very big weed farm. They supply fixed carbon to half the mines.Ф
УTheir leader is a gengineer,Ф Gospel said.
Trinity said, УHe calls himself Rothar. I donТt think itТs his real name. They say he ran from Earth because they caught him doing something illegal. HeТs probably doing something illegal out there, too.Ф
УMaybe making more monsters,Ф Champion said. УMaybe he makes one monster too many and wants you to kill it.Ф
УThey are strange people,Ф Gospel said. УNot Christian at all, although they claim to be. They call themselves Adamists.Ф
This was more than Indira had managed to glean about the monastery from the net. The miners didnТt know many hard facts, but they had plenty of gossip. Their talk grew lively and wild. Three hours after the beginning of the eclipse, the double star of Earth and Venus rose above JupiterТs dark bulk, and then the Sun followed and flooded the ice plain with its light. Trinity took up his guitar again and had half the observation car singing along by the time the train reached Cadmus.

Cadmus was an industrial settlement, several clusters of stilt buildings, storage tanks, a big spaceport that was essentially an ice field pitted with black exhaust blasts, the long track of a mass driver. Indira caught a few hours rest in a rented cubicle. Before she fell asleep, she talked with Carr about the small change of his day. Alice was sleeping. She missed her mother, Carr said.
УI miss her too.Ф
УBe careful,Ф Carr said.
Soldiers of the Three Powers Occupying Force were much in evidence. Two officers were talking loudly in the canteen where Indira ate breakfast, oblivious to the resentful stares of the miners around them, and she had to endure a fifteen minute interrogation before she could board the rolligon bus that would carry her to the monastery of Scyld Shield.
The journey took ten hours. As the bus traveled west, the diamond point of the Sun descended ahead of it, while Jupiter hung low in the eastЧIndira had traveled a long way, a quarter of the way around the icy little moon. Jupiter was almost full, banded vertically with the intricately ruffled yellow and whites of his perpetual storms. Their slow churning was visible if Indira watched long enough. IoТs yellow disc fell below the horizon and an hour later rose, renewed.
The road was a single track raised on an embankment above a wide plain of crustal plates. Some were more than ten kilometers across; most were much smaller.
Changes in currents in EuropaТs ocean had broken the plates apart again and again, rafting them into new positions. It was like crossing the shaken pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of simple Euclidean shapes. You could see here that the surface of Europa was a thin skin of ice over the ocean, as fragile as the craquelure on an ancient painting. Triplet ridge and groove features cut across the plates. They were caused by the upwelling of water through stress fractures. The ridges were breccia dikes, ice mixed with mineralized silicates, complexly faulted and folded; the grooves between them were almost pure waterice. They were like a vast freeway system half-built and abruptly abandoned, cut across where the ice plates had fractured or had been buried by bluewhite icy flows that had spewed from newer fissures.
The road the bus was following crossed a groove so wide that the ridge on one side disappeared over the horizon before the ridge on the far side appeared. Beyond it, geysers powered by convective upwellings had built clusters of low hills that shone amidst patches of darker material.
Like Io, EuropaТs core was kept molten by heat generated by tidal distortions that pulled it this way and that as the moon orbited Jupiter; heat leaking through underwater vents and volcanoes kept the ocean from freezing beneath its icy crust and drove big cellular currents from bottom to top. Cadmus was at the edge of the Nemo Chaos, where a huge upwelling current kept the ice crust less than a kilometer thick. The same upwelling currents that eroded and shaped the icy crust brought up minerals from the bottom of the ocean. It was why the miners were there. Indira saw a solitary cabin crawling away toward the horizon, its red beacon flashing. Every twenty or thirty kilometers, the bus passed the drillhead of a mine, with one or two or three cabins raised high on stilts like so many copies of Baba YagaТs hut. The mines pumped mineralrich water into huge settling basins. Vacuum organisms grew on the ice and extracted metals, and the miners harvested them.
Alice called Indira. She was enthusiastic about her project. Indira pretended to be enthusiastic, too, but she resolved that she would talk with AliceТs monitors when this was over. Her daughterТs education was taking a direction she didnТt like.
УSpend some time with Carr,Ф Indira told Alice. УHelp him out.Ф
УI donТt like the flowers. Some of them make me sneeze. And the light is too bright in the greenhouses.Ф
УIt helps them grow.Ф
УThe weeds donТt need light.Ф
УThatТs because they donТt photosynthesize.Ф
УI know that. TheyТreЧФ Alice scrunched up her face and slowly and carefullyЧ Уchemolithotrophs. They absorb the chemicals in the water and make biomass, which we eat.Ф
They talked about the metabolism of the weeds for a while. Alice promised that she would ask Carr about photosynthesis. She said that she was doing some gene splicing in the garden labs, using the cell gun. Indira was encouraging. The more time Alice spent in the labs and the gardens, the less she spent skulking around the lower levels of the city.
The bus had low priority and had to keep pulling into laybys to allow trucks to pass. Indira was its only passenger, and its first for several weeks. It seemed that very few people went to Scyld Shield. The bus grumbled that the monks werenТt friendly.
УThey tell me to be quiet, and it is a long drive out. I like to talk. ItТs part of my personality design.Ф The bus paused. It added, УI hope you donТt mind talking with me.Ф
УWhat do you know about the monastery?Ф
УIt was a mine, before the war. The monks have built around the old shaft. But of course, I have never been inside. They donТt have a garage. If I broke down, someone would have to come all the way out from Cadmus. ItТs irresponsible, but thatТs the way things are these days in the free market economy. No one wants to pay for the upkeep of publicly owned infrastructure.Ф
Someone had probably dumped a bunch of antilibertarian propaganda in the busТs memory. Indira was sympathetic, but hastily told it that she wasnТt interested in discussing politics. There was a silence. At last the bus said:
УMany of the trucks come from the monastery. They supply huge amounts of cheap fixed carbon. Glycogens, proteins, cellulose, starches. They supply the bioreactors of most of the mines in this region.Ф
УThere must be a lot of monks in the monastery.Ф
УI wouldnТt know,Ф the bus said. УOnly two of them regularly travel to and from Cadmus. The rest keep themselves to themselves.Ф
Which was what the dispatcher at the bus garage had told Indira. She could have called Vlad Simonov, of course, but she had her pride.
The Sun set. JupiterТs hard yellow light spread across the ice plains. Io had disappeared behind him; a few of the brightest stars had come out. Ahead, something briefly glittered on the horizon, vanishing before Indira could see what it was. The bus crawled on, and an hour later, Indira saw the fugitive glitter again, much closer now. A plume of gas, shining in JupiterТs sullen light.
УThere she blows,Ф the bus said.
УWhat is it?Ф
УScyld ShieldТs methane vent,Ф the bus said. УMost of the mines around here have them.Ф
УOf course.Ф
Methane bubbled up from the hydrothermal vents and collected under the ice crust, occasionally breaking the rafts apart as it escaped through fault lines. Mines vented excess methane to keep themselves stabilized. The methane dispersed, of course, for at  l50░C EuropaТs surface was just above its triple point, but the vent had deposited drifts of dirty white water snow across a huge polygonal plate. The monastery was on a ridge of brecciated ice beyond.
It was not as large as Indira expected, no more than a single silvered dome. The bus took a spur off the main road. It climbed a winding switchback up the face of the ridge and dived into a wide apron hacked out of an ice bench, where half a dozen tanker trucks were parked in front of a mass of insulated pipes, presumably taking on loads of raw biomass. The bus reversed onto a airlock coupling and said goodbye to Indira.
УIТll be back in three days,Ф it said. УI come here every three days even when there isnТt anyone who wants to ride. That is, if I donТt break down. Perhaps you can tell me about the monastery when I take you back to Cadmus.Ф
The luggage pod followed Indira through the freezing cold flexible coupling into a big, echoing, brightly lit room. Two monks were waiting there. Both wore black robes and a kind of cowl around their heads, topped with square headdresses. Both had untrimmed patriarchal beards, with big pectoral crosses hung over them. The older monk was impassive, but the younger was the first man Indira had ever seen do a doubletake in real life.

They had been expecting a man. Sending Indira had been Vlad SimonovТs idea of a joke.