"G. David Nordley - Into the Miranda Rift" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nordley G. David)

But, by that time, I fear there were substantial empty places in Nikhil,
too.
Like Miranda, this wasn't clear from his urbane and vital surface when
we met. He was tall for a Bengali, a lack of sun had left his skin with only a
tint of bronze, and he had a sharp face that hinted at an Arab or a Briton
in his ancestry; likely both. He moved with a sort of quick, decisive energy
that nicely balanced the tolerant good-fellow manners of an academic
aristocrat in the imperial tradition. If he now distrusted people in general,
if he kept them all at a pleasantly formal distance, if he harbored a secret
contempt for his species, well, this had not been apparent to Catherine
Ray, M.D., who had married him after his academic rehabilitation.
I think she later found the emptiness within him and part of her had
recoiled, while the other, controlling, part found no objective reason to
leave a relationship that let her flit around the top levels of Solar System
academia. Perhaps that explained why she chose to go on a fortnight of
exploration with someone she seemed to detest; oh, the stories she would
tell. Perhaps that explained her cynicism. Perhaps not.
We entered the great rift three days of an age ago, at the border of the
huge chevron formation: the rift where two dissimilar geologic structures
meet, held together by Miranda's gentle gravity and little else. Below the
cratered, dust-choked surface, the great rift was a network of voids
between pressure ridges; rough wood, slap-glued together by a lazy
carpenter on a Saturday night. It could, Nikhil thinks, go through the
entire moon. There were other joints, other rifts, other networks of empty
placesтАФbut this was the big one.
Ah, yes, those substantial amounts of nothing. As a poet, I was
fascinated by contradiction and I found a certain attraction to exploring
vast areas of hidden emptiness under shells of any kind.
I fill voids, so to speak. I was an explicit rebel in a determinedly
impressionist literary world of artful obscurity which fails to generate
recognition or to make poets feel like they are doing anything more
meaningful than the intellectual equivalent of masturbationтАФand pays
them accordingly. The metaphor of Miranda intrigued me; an epic lay
there beneath the dust and ice. Wonders to behold there must be in the
biggest underground system of caverns in the known Universe. The
articles, interviews, and talk shows played out in my mind. All I had to do
was get there.
I had a good idea of how to do that. Her name was Miranda Lotati.
Four years ago, the spelunking daughter of the guy in charge of "Solar
System Astrographic's" project board had been a literature student of
mine at Coriolis University. When I heard of the discovery of Nikhil's
mysterious caverns, it was a trivial matter to renew the acquaintance, this
time without the impediments of faculty ethics. By this time she had an
impressive list of caves, mountains, and other strange places to her credit,
courtesy of her father's money and connections, I had thought.
She had seemed a rough-edged, prickly woman in my class, and her
essays were dry condensed dullness, never more than the required length,
but which covered the points involved well enough that honesty had forced
me to pass her.
Now, armed with news of the moon Miranda's newly discovered