"Robert Reed - A Place With Shade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

lights were strong, heating the cavern's new air, and we manufactured rich
soils
with scrap rock and silt from Provo's own little sea. The first inhabitants
were
bacteria and fungi set free to chew and multiply, giving the air its first
living scent. Then robots began assembling tree-shaped molds, sinking hollow
roots into the new earth and a sketchwork of branches meshing overhead,
beginning the future canopy.

We filled the molds with water, nutrients, and nourishing electrical currents,
then inoculated them with totipotent cells. More like baking than gardening,
this was how mature forest could be built from scratch. Living cells divided
at
an exponential rate, then assembled themselves into tissue-types -- sapwood
and
heartwood, bark and vascular tubes. It's a kind of superheated cultivation,
and
how else could artists like me exist? Left to Nature's pace, anything larger
than a terrarium would consume entire lives. Literally.

Within five months -- on schedule -- we were watching the robots break up the
molds, exposing the new trees to the air. And that's a symbolic moment worth a
break and a little celebration, which we held.

Just Ula and me.

I suggested inviting Provo, but she told me, "Not yet. It's too soon to show
him
yet."

Perhaps. Or did she want her father kept at a distance?

I didn't ask. I didn't care. We were dining on top of a rough little hill, at
the midpoint of the cavern, whiteness above and the new forest below us,
leafless, resembling thousands of stately old trees pruned back by giant
shears.
Stubby, enduring trees. I toasted our success, and Ula grinned, almost singing
when she said, "I haven't been the bother you expected, have I?"

No, she hadn't been.

"And I know more about terraforming than you thought."

More than I would admit. I nodded and said, "You're adept, considering you're
self-taught."

"No," she sang, "you're the disappointment."

"Am I?"