"Robert Reed - The Caldera of Good Fortune" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

the rising steam and the falling snows.

The eruption would come today, or next week. Or after several more
months of patient bubbling, the heat would dissipate, the artificial magma
allowed to cool until this carefully regulated hazard was past.

Eruptions were much the same on the LuckiesтАЩ home world. Quakes
and rising plumes could burst free anywhere. A new volcano might build
and then later explode, leaving a gaping wound. Then the heated
groundwater would percolate through the fractured crust, filling every hole
with a fresh young lake. The first colonists to arrive inside a new caldera
were the fortunate ones. They and their descendants ruled until the next
eruption. Hence the name: Luckies.

Most cold worlds were sterile, or, at best, had stunted forests
incapable of feeding the slowest bug. But the LuckiesтАЩ home world enjoyed
its own good fortune. The soggy, constantly shifting crust was filled with
microbes using every metabolic trick. They danced with energetic irons and
sodiums, carbon monoxides and nitrates. But the real producers were
root-like giantsтАФunderground forests that choked every crevice, every
pore, feasting on piezoelectric reactions and the physical flexing of the
ground, even pumping water into the magma pools, creating steam that
powered elaborate, turbine-like organs.

Every eruption was preceded by a season of rapid, joyous growth.

The Luckies riding the Great Ship had just this one caldera.
Cataclysmic eruptions werenтАЩt possible, much less sought after. But the
general rhythms of their old life held sway: Their lake simmered and then
boiled, and their crystalline bodies separated and grew tough spore-like
shells. Then the volcano erupted, flinging the water skyward as a scalding
cloud, and trillions of tiny bodies were flung high by that carefully calibrated
blast. Most of the tiny aliens fell outside the caldera, and they were dead.
But those that found their way home again were blessed and knew it, and
within a few months, they would be well on their way to rebuilding the
society from Before.

Even locals referred to the rim community as a forest. But except for
a passing resemblance to dead, leafless trees, the landscape had more in
common with leaf litter, or better, with compost. The pale gray remains of
dead roots had been pushed out of every hole, expelled by what was still
living underground. Unlike the mirror-forests below, this realm had animal
lifeтАФsmall crawlies and bigger crawlies, everything cloaked in fur and fat
and tough genetics and variable metabolisms. But instead of the usual
chirps and drummings, Crockett heard only silence. This was new.
Yesterday the forest was still jabbering away; but now, for the first time, he
found himself wondering if the eruption was imminent.

The cable car slid into its empty berth.