"Larry Niven - The Integral Trees (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Discipline




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


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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
Disc~pline 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 r~mship 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. Disc~pline was subject to slow erosive forces. He
couldn't last forever in this place.
At least the crew were not extinct.
That would have hurt him terribly.
He had done his duty. Their ancestors had been mutineers, a potential threat to the State
itself. To reeducate their descendants was his goal, but if the Smoke Ring had killed them . . .
well, it would not have surprised him. It took more than breathable air to keep men alive. The
Smoke Ring was green with the life that had evolved for that queer environment. Native life might
well have killed of those Johnny-comelately rivals, the erstwhile crew of the seeder ramship
Discipline.
Sharls would have grieved; but he would have been free to return home.
They'd call me an obsolete failure, he thought gloomily while his instruments sought a
particular frequency in the radio range. A thousand years out of date by the time I'm home. They'd