"Jerry Oltion - Artifacts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

were robbing technology from random sources they couldn't necessarily get a smooth marriage.
***


After repairs it was back into the tanks for deceleration. Boom, boom, boom, and they were at rest
relative to the Artifact. They'd stopped two hundred thousand miles to the side of it, since they didn't
want to use the main drive any closer than that, but from there it was a relatively easy jaunt across the
gap. Like Earth to the Moon. Piece of cake.
Pierre piloted them in using a more conventional rocket engine. Brian watched through the porthole--a
heavily reinforced window only a foot across, the biggest one on the ship--as they approached the
Artifact. That was what the tabs had been calling it, as if it were the only one, but in truth the Solar
System was lousy with artifacts. The place was four billion years old, after all, and the galaxy was full of
life. Had been, anyway. It apparently came and went, usually on the wings of religion or warfare, judging
by the records left behind. Explorers had identified fourteen separate waves of expansion, involving at
least thirty races. All of whom left their garbage behind. And a few of whom left treasures.
This one looked like a treasure. It certainly looked alien enough to contain something humanity hadn't
come up with on its own. It was mostly a spaghetti pile of tubes, each about fifty feet across with an
occasional swelling to accommodate large machinery. Some of the tubes were habitat for winged
serpentine monsters about ten feet tall (long dead, fortunately--or unfortunately, depending on a person's
point of view), but the rest were just a warren of passages full of stuff. Like most artifacts, however,
nobody knew what any of it was intended to do. They had learned with the Phobos station not to just
push buttons at random, so the team studying this one was taking their time here, looking at things
closely.
But even mistakes made in haste could have interesting consequences. Phobos made a much more
beautiful set of rings than it ever had a moon.
The people they had left behind on their last trip were glad to see them again. A supply ship meant
fresh faces, fresh equipment, and best of all, fresh vegetables. After six months on an isolated station,
Brian had had people offer sex for a good crisp apple.
These scientists weren't quite that glad to see their supply ship, at least not overtly. Brian imagined later
on most of his crew would get lucky, but the dozen or so people crowded around the airlock when they
arrived were all fully clothed and much more interested in showing off what they had accomplished since
the ship was last there.
The lead xenologist, a small, energetic woman named Julie, shoved a U-shaped device into Brian's
hands. A boomerang? No, it was a headset. A massive one. He recognized it from when he was there
the first time, on his own and poking through the Artifact in a spacesuit with a headlamp. There had been
racks of them in many of the rooms he had entered; they were one of the things that had convinced him
this place would be worth investigating further. "Turn it on," Julie said.
"How?" he asked. She pointed at a rough spot on one side. He wondered why she didn't switch it on
herself, but it looked simple enough so he pressed his thumb into the spot.
Suddenly he was flying through the air. For a second he thought the headset was pulling him through
the airlock vestibule, but then he realized he wasn't even in the airlock. He was back on Rockaway
Station, in Lunar orbit, skydiving down its ten-mile-long central axis in the nude. And he was female. She
was exulting in the moment; everyone was looking at her. She commanded the attention of the whole
colony. Soon she would command their lives. She reached up to cup her breasts seductively, and
suddenly he was back in the Artifact vestibule, himself again. The motion of his hands had broken the
connection.
The headset was a virtual reality generator. A good one--he hadn't even had to put it on his head--but
nothing fundamentally new. Brian wondered at the program Julie had chosen to run for him; was this
some new way to proposition someone? If so, shouldn't she have given it to Pierre? They had been
practically inseparable on the last trip. But even if she was after Brian now, it hadn't worked. He was left