"Mike Moscoe - Society of Humanity 03 - They Also Serve" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moscoe Mike)

"There are some things me ma says we are not meant to know. I'll get your lunch pail."
Jeff watched Annie go, wanting very much to know the feel of her touch. Wanting to
spend the day exploring her mountains and valleys. He gulped down another piece of
bread.
The Caretaker of the Nature Preserve felt the mountain-top go, though bothered no more than a
carbon-based life might be by a cut hair. The mountain was there in one moment of awareness and
gone the next. It did, however, cause the Caretaker to marvel. He could not find in memory when a
Displacer had last been used. But it was not its purpose to keep track of such things. Then again, it
was difficult these days for the Caretaker to remember just what was its purpose.

It was supposed to protect the flora and fauna of a specific area. Over the years, what with
erosion, that area was only dimly marked by its pattern recognition system. And since there was so
little to do since the Three went away, and fewer visits by repair units from the Central Font of All
Knowledge, the Caretaker had gotten a bit slipshod in its work.

All that had changed recently. Three hundred orbits ago a new group of Sentients arrived. Not
one of the Three, it had puzzled the Caretaker. Unlike those who came long ago, these had a need
to remake their surroundings in ways the Caretaker could not help them in. Indeed, they had
disrupted the Caretaker's coverage by the way they turned the earth and dug in it. The Caretaker
had been unsuccessful in all its efforts to connect with them. Understandable, since it was only the
Caretaker, not the Font of All Knowledge.

Only when it tried to pass along to the Font of All Knowledge the interesting challenge of these
new Sentients did the Caretaker notice that it was no longer in contact with the Center. It had sent
off a slow messenger to the Center and done what a Caretaker could to help these new ones adjust
to their time in this wonderful nature.

These creatures had provided the Caretaker with many new experiences. For one thing, they
did not leaveтАФnot after a while, at least. For another, they brought forth more of themselves. They
ignored the tools easily available to them and instead made other, simpler ones. If the Caretaker
could have shrugged, it would have. Now the strange new ones had used a Displacer. Were they
ready to learn how to use all that the Caretaker could make available to them?




THREE
A WEEK LATER, Ray frowned as he buckled into a seat in the shuttle's passenger bay.
He still knew too damn little about this planet. Behind him, Mary commanded ten
marines under Cassie, her second, and ten midshipmen under KatтАФall in full battle kit.
With luck, by nightfall the middies would be in an orgy of data acquisition and the marines
would be ordering beers in whatever passed for bars dirtside.

Without luckтАФwell, that was what the battle kit was for.
Not that M-6 rifles would do all that good against something that leveled mountains.
No more had gone missing, but the one still held his attention. Ray glanced at the reader
in his hand. He cycled it to a report one middie had circulated quietly among her friends,
one of whom had passed it along to someone who'd passed it to enough people that Ray
ended up with a bootleg copy.