"Tom Purdom - Fossil Games" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

on the ship. Madame Dawne was so old she had actually been born on Earth. All
the other people on board had been born (created, in most cases) in the
habitats the human race had scattered across the Solar System.
The Island of Adventure had been the first ship to embark for 82 Eridani.
Thirty-two years after it had left the Solar System, a ship called Green
Voyager had pointed its rocky bow at Rho. The texts of its transmissions had
indicated the oldest passengers on the Green Voyager were two decades younger
than the youngest passengers on the Island of Adventure.
If the passengers on the Island of Adventure approved the course change,
they would arrive at Rho about the same time the Green Voyager arrived there.
They would find themselves sharing the same star system with humans who were,
on average, three or four decades younger than they were. Madame Dawne would
be confronted with brains and bodies that had been designed a full century
after she had received her own biological equipment.

****

Morgan was not a politician by temperament but he was fascinated by any
activity that combined conflict with intellectual effort. When his pairing
with Savela Insdotter had finally come to an end, he had isolated himself in
his apartment and spent a decade and a half studying the literature on the
dynamics of small communities. The knowledge he had absorbed would probably
look prehistoric to the people now living in the Solar System. It had been
stored in the databanks pre-2203. But it provided him with techniques that
should produce the predicted results when they were applied to people who had
reached adulthood several decades before 2200.
The Island of Adventure was managed, for all practical purposes, by its
information system. A loosely organized committee monitored the system but
there was no real government. The humans on board were passengers, the
information system was the crew, and the communal issues that came up usually
involved minor housekeeping procedures.
Now that a real issue had arisen, Morgan's fellow passengers drifted into
a system of continuous polling-- a system that had been the commonest form of
political democracy when they had left the Solar System. Advocates talked and
lobbied. Arguments flowed through the electronic symposiums and the
face-to-face social networks. Individuals registered their opinions-- openly
or anonymously-- when they decided they were willing to commit themselves. At
any moment you could call up the appropriate screen and see how the count
looked.
The most vociferous support for the course change came from eight
individuals. For most of the three thousand fifty-seven people who lived in
the ship's apartments, the message from the probe was a minor development. The
ship was their home-- in the same way a hollowed out asteroid in the Solar
System could have been their home. The fact that their habitat would
occasionally visit another star system added spice to the centuries that lay
ahead, but it wasn't their primary interest in life. The Eight, on the other
hand, seemed to feel they would be sentencing themselves to decades of
futility if they agreed to visit a lifeless star system.
Morgan set up a content analysis program and had it monitor the traffic
flowing through the public information system. Eighteen months after the