"1 The Integral Trees" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

The Integral Trees
by Larry Niven
Copyright (c) 1983
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This book is dedicated to Robert Forward, for the stories he's sparked in me, for his help in working out the parameters of the Smoke Ring and for his big roomy mind.
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CONTENTS:
Prologue:
Discipline 1
Chapter One: Quinn Tuft 5
Chapter Two: Leavetaking 18
Chapter Three: The Trunk 27
Chapter Four: Flashers and Fan Fungus 36
Chapter Five: Memories 45
Chapter Six: Middle Ground 52
Chapter Seven: The Checker's Hand 63
Chapter Eight: Quinn Tribe 69
Chapter Nine: The Raft 78
Chapter Ten: The Moby 89
Chapter Eleven: The Cotton-Candy Jungle 97
Chapter Twelve: The Copsik Runners 105
Chapter Thirteen: The Scientist's Apprentice 114
Chapter Fourteen. Treemouth and Citadel 123
Chapter Fifteen: London Tree 131
Chapter Sixteen: Rumblings of Mutiny 140
Chapter Seventeen: When Birnhain Wood 149
Chapter Eighteen: The War of London Tree 158
Chapter Nineteen: The Silver Man 168
Chapter Twenty: The Position of Scientist's Apprentice 178
Chapter Twenty-one: Go For Gold 189
Chapter Twenty-two: Citizens' Tree 198
Dramatis Personae 208
Glossary 210 ====================================================

Prologue
Discipline

IT WAS TAKING TOO LONG, MUCH LONGER THAN HE HAD EXPECTED.

Sharis Davis Kendy had not been an impatient man. After the change he had thought himself immune to impatience. But it was taking too long! What were they doing in there?

His senses were not limited. Sharis's telescopic array was powerful; he could sense the full electromagnetic spectrum, from microwave up to X-ray. But the Smoke Ring balked his view. It was a storm of wind, dust, clouds of water vapor, huge rippling drops of dirty water or thin mud, masses of free-floating rock; dots and motes and clumps of green, green surfaces on the drops and the rocks green tinges of algae in the clouds; trees shaped like integration signs, oriented radially to the neutron star and tufted with green at both ends; whale-sized creatures with vast mouths, to skim the green-tinged clouds .

Life was everywhere in the Smoke Ring. Claire Dalton had called it a Christmas wreath. Claire had been a very old woman before the State revived her as a corpsicle. The others had never seen a Christmas wreath; nor had Kendy. What they had seen, half a thousand years ago, was a perfect smoke ring several tens of thousands of kilometers across, with a tiny hot pinpoint in its center.

Their reports had been enthusiastic. Life was DNA-based, the air was not only breathable, but tasted fine

Discipline presently occupied the point of gravitational neutrality behind Goldblatt's World, the L2 point. This close, the sky split equally into star-sprinkled, black- and green-tinged cloudscape. Directly below, a vast distorted whirlpool of storm hid the residue of a gas giant planet, a rocky nugget two and a half times the mass of Earth.

Sharis would not enter that inner region. The maelstrom of forces could damage his ship. He couldn't guess how long the seeder ramship must survive to accomplish his mission. He had waited more than half a thousand years already. The L2 point was still within the gas torus of which the Smoke Ring was only the densest part. Discipline was subject to slow erosive forces. He couldn't last forever in this place.