"The Collapsium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

Pass the Northern Hills; watch the stream trickle out between them; see the
forest give way to willows at its bank. The bridge is a quaint little arch of
native wood; on the far side lie the grasslands of afternoon, the vegetable
gardens tended by stoop-backed robots, the fields of wild barley and maize
tended by no one, lit by slantwise rays. Behind you, the sun dips low, then
slips behind the planet's sharply curved horizon. Despite the refraction of
atmospheric hazes, darkness is sudden, and with it the terrain grows rockyЧnot
jagged but hard and flat and boulder-strewn, dotted with hardy Mediterranean
weeds. But here the stream winds back again, and as evening fades to night the
channel of it widens out into cattail marshland and feeds, finally, into a
little freshwater sea. Sometimes the moon is out, drawing long white reflections
across the silent water, but tonight it's only the stars and the Milky Way haze
and the distant, pinpoint gleam of Sol. All of history is down there; if you
like, you can cover the human race with your hand.
It grows colder; realize the planet shields you from the little sunЧthe only
local heat sourceЧwith the deadly chill of outer space so close you could
literally throw a rock into it. But the beach leads around to twilight meadows,
and the horizon ruddies up with scattered light, and then suddenly it's morning
again, the sun breaking warmly above the planet's round edge. And there is
Bruno's house: low, flat, gleaming marble-white and morning-yellow. You've
walked a little over two kilometers.
Such was Bruno's morning constitutional, very much like all his others.
Sometimes he'd fetch a coat and take the other route, over the hills, over the
poles, through cold and dark and cold and hot, but that was mainly a masochism
thing; the polar route was actually shorter, and a good deal less scenic.
He'd already eaten breakfast; the walk was to aid his digestion, to invigorate
his mind for the needs of the day: his experiments. The front door opened for
him. Inside, robot servants stepped gracefully out of his way, providing a clear
path to the study, bowing as he passed, though he'd told them a thousand times
not to. He grumbled at them wordlessly as he passed. They didn't reply, of
course, though their bronze and tin-gray manikin bodies hummed and clicked with
faint life. Mechanical, unburdened by imagination or want, they were utterly
dedicated to his comfort, his satisfaction.
Another door opened for him, closed behind him, vanished. He waved a hand, and
the windows became walls. Waved another, and the ceiling lights vanished, the
floor lights vanished, the desk and chairs and other furnishings became optical
superconductors: invisible. Projective holography created the illusion of his
day's apparatus: fifty collapsons, tiny perfect cubes visible as pinpoints of
Cerenkov light, powder-blue and pulsing faintly, circling the holographic planet
in a complex dance of swapping orbits.
He'd spent the past week assembling these, after his last batch had gone sour.
Assembling them? Certainly.
Imagine a sphere of di-clad neutronium, shiny with Compton-scattered light. It's
a sort of very large atomic nucleus; a billion tons of normal matter crushed
down to a diameter of three centimeters so that the protons and electrons that
comprise it are bonded together into a thick neutron paste. Left to itself it
would, within nanoseconds, explode back into a billion tons of protons and
electrons, this time with considerable outward momentum. Hence the cladding:
crystalline diamond and fibrediamond and then crystalline again, with a bound
layer of wellstone on top. Tough stuff indeed; breaking the neutrons free of