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

had enough money to fuel their lifestyles, they would open their possessions
to
the curious and the public.

But here I could do my best work, and who would know?

"Shall we make a jungle, Hann?"

I would know, I told myself.

And with a forced wink, I said, "Let's begin."

Terraforming is an ancient profession.
Making your world more habitable began on the Earth itself, with the first
dancing fire that warmed its builder's cave; and everything since -- every
green
world and asteroid and comet -- is an enlargement on that first cozy cave. A
hotter fusion fire brings heat and light, and benign organisms roam inside
standardized biomes. For two hundred and ten centuries humans have expanded
the
Realm, mastering the tricks to bring life to a nearly dead universe. The
frontier is an expanding sphere more than twenty light-years in radius -- a
great peaceful firestorm of life -- and to date only one other living world
has
been discovered. Pitcairn. Alien and violent, and gorgeous. And the basic
inspiration/or the recent New Traditionalist movement. Pitcairn showed us how
bland and domesticated our homes had become, riddled with cliches, every world
essentially like every other world. Sad, sad, sad.

Here I found myself with four hundred square kilometers of raw stone. How long
would it take to build a mature jungle? Done simply, a matter of months. But
novelty would take longer, much to Provo's consternation. We would make fresh
species, every ecological tie unique. I anticipated another year on top of the
months, which was very good. We had the best computers, the best bio-stocks,
and
thousands of robots eager to work without pause or complaint. It was an ideal
situation, I had to admit to myself. Very nearly heaven.

We insulated the ice ceiling and walls by three different means. Field charges
enclosed the heated air. If they were breached, durable refrigeration elements
were sunk into the ice itself. And at my insistence we added a set of
emergency
ducts, cold compressed air waiting in side caverns in case of tragedies. Every
organism could go into a sudden dormancy, and the heat would be sucked into
the
huge volumes of surrounding ice. Otherwise the ceiling might sag and collapse,
and I didn't want that to happen. Ula's jungle was supposed to outlast all of
us. Why else go to all of this bother?

We set the reactor inside the mine shaft, behind the eventual cliche. Then