"Alastair Reynolds - Spirey And The Queen (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

We'd arrived somewhere.
It was a chamber, large as any enclosed space I'd ever seen. I felt
gravity; too much of the stuff. The whole chamber must have been gimbaled
and spun within the splinter, like one of the gee-load simulators back in
Tiger's Eye. The vaulted ceiling, hundreds of meters 'above', now seemed
vertiginously higher. Apart from its apex, it was covered in intricate
frescos - dozens of pictorial facets, each a cycling hologram. They told
the history of the Swirl, beginning with its condensation from
interstellar gas, the ignition of its star, the onset of planetary
formation. Then the action cut to the arrival of the first Standardist
wasp, programmed to dive into the Swirl and breed like a rabbit, so that
one day there'd be a sufficiently huge population to begin mining the
thing; winnowing out metals, silicates and precious organics for the folks
back home. 'Course, it never happened like that. The Royalists wanted in
on the action, so they sent their own wasps, programmed to attack ours.
The rest is history. The frescos showed the war's beginning, and then a
little while later the arrival of the first human observers, beamed across
space as pure genetic data, destined to be born in artificial wombs in
hollowed out comet-cores, raised and educated by wasps, imprinted with the
best tactical and strategic knowledge available. Thereafter they taught
the wasps. From then on things hotted up, because the observers weren't
limited by years of timelag. They were able to intervene in wasp evolution
in realtime.
That ought to have been it, because by then we were pretty up to date,
give or take four hundred years of the same.


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But the frescos carried on.
There was one representing some future state of the Swirl, neatly ordered
into a ticking orrery of variously sized and patterned worlds, some with
beautiful rings or moon systems. And finally - like Mediaeval conceptions
of Eden - there was a triptych of lush planetary landscapes, with wierd
animals in the foreground, mountains and soaring cloudbanks behind.
"Seen enough to convince you?" Wendigo asked.
"No," I said, not entirely sure whether I believed myself. Craning my
neck, I looked up toward the apex.
Something hung from it.
What it was was a pair of wasps, fused together. One was complete, the
other was only fully-formed, seemingly in the process of splitting from
the complete wasp. The fused pair looked to have been smothered in molten
bronze, left to dry in waxy nodules.
"You know what this is?" Wendigo asked.
"I'm waiting."
"Wasp art."
I looked at her.
"This wasp was destroyed mid-replication," Wendigo continued. "While it
was giving birth. Evidently the image has some poignancy for them. How I'd