"Alastair Reynolds - Glacial" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

truth about what had happened to the colony on Diadem: a biology lab experiment that had gone
terribly wrong? Something to do with the worms, perhaps?
But after a while, overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead, Clavain had allowed the exact
details of Setterholm's death to slip from his mind. He was hardly unique anyway: just one more
example of the way most of them had died; not by suicide or violence but through carelessness,
recklessness, or just plain stupidity. Basic safety procedures -- like not wandering into a crevasse
zone without the right equipment -- had been forgotten or ignored. Machines had been used
improperly. Drugs had been administered incorrectly. Sometimes the victim had taken only
themselves to the grave, but in other cases the death toll had been much higher. And it had all
happened so swiftly.
Galiana talked about it as if it were some kind of psychosis, while the other Conjoiners
speculated about some kind of emergent neural condition, buried in the gene pool of the entire
colony, lurking for years until it was activated by an environmental trigger.
Clavain, while not discounting his friends' theories, could not help but think of the worms. They
were everywhere, after all, and the Americans had certainly been interested in them -- Setterholm
especially. Clavain himself had pressed his faceplate against the ice and seen that the worms
reached down to the depth where the man had died. Their fine burrowing trails scratched into the
vertical ice walls like the branchings of a river delta; the dark nodes of breeding tangled at the
intersections of the larger tunnels. The tiny black worms had infested the glacier completely, and
this would only be one distinct colony out of the millions that existed all over Diadem's frozen
regions. The worm biomass in this one colony must have been several dozen tons at the very least.
Had the Americans' studies of the worms unleashed something which shattered the mind, turning
them all into stumbling fools?
He sensed Galiana's quiet presence at the back of his thoughts, where she had not been a moment
earlier.
"Nevil," she said. "We're ready to leave again."
"You're done with the ruin already?"
"It isn't very interesting -- just a few equipment shacks. There are still some remains to the north
we have to look over, and it'd be good to get there before nightfall."
"But I've only been gone half an hour or --"
"Two hours, Nevil."
He checked his wrist display unbelievingly, but Galiana was right: he had been out alone on the
glacier for all that time. Time away from the others always seemed to fly by, like sleep to an
exhausted man. Perhaps the analogy was accurate, at that: sleep was when the mammalian brain
took a rest from the business of processing the external universe, allowing the accumulated
experience of the day to filter down into long-term memory: collating useful memories and
discarding what did not need to be remembered. And for Clavain -- who still needed normal sleep --
these periods away from the others were when his mind took a rest from the business of engaging in
frantic neural communion with the other Conjoiners. He could almost feel his neurones breathing a
vast collective groan of relief, now that all they had to do was process the thoughts of a single mind.
Two hours was nowhere near enough.
"I'll be back shortly," Clavain said. "I just want to pick up some more worm samples, then I'll be
on my way."
"You've picked up hundreds of the damned things already, Nevil, and they're all the same, give or
take a few trivial differences."
"I know. But it can't hurt to indulge an old man's irrational fancies, can it?"
As if to justify himself, he knelt down and began scooping surface ice into a small sample
container. The leech-sized worms riddled the ice so thoroughly that he was bound to have picked up
a few individuals in this sample, even though he would not know for sure until he got back to the
shuttle's lab. If he were lucky, the sample might even hold a breeding tangle; a knot of several