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

Wendigo's timing couldn't have been better, because at that moment light
flooded the train's brushed-steel interior.
The tunnel had become a glass tube, anchored to one wall of a vast cavern
suffused in emerald light. The far wall was tiered, draping rafts of
foliage. Our wall was steep and forested, oddly-curved waterfalls draining
into stepped pools. The waterfalls were bent away from true 'vertical' by
coriolis force, evidence that - just like the first chamber - this entire
space was independently spinning within the splinter. The stepped pools
were surrounded by patches of grass, peppered with moving forms which
might have been naked people. There were wasps as well - tending the
people.
As the people grew clearer I had that flinch you get when your gaze strays
onto someone with a shocking disfigurement. Roughly half of them were
males.
"Imported Royalists," Wendigo said. "Remember I said they'd turned feral?
Seems there was an accident, not long after the wasps made the jump to
sentience. A rogue demon, or something. Decimated them."
"They have both sexes."
"You'll get used to it, Spirey - conceptually anyway. Tiger's Eye wasn't
always exclusively female, you know that? It was just something we evolved
into. Began with you pilots, matter of fact. Fem physiology made sense for
pilots - women were smaller, had better gee-load tolerance, better stress
psychodynamics and required fewer consumables than males. We were products
of bio-engineering from the outset, so it wasn't hard to make the jump to
an all-fem culture."
"Makes me want to...I don't know." I forced my gaze away from the
Royalists. "Puke or something. It's like going back to having hair all
over your body."
"That's because you grew up with something different."
"Did they always have two sexes?"
"Probably not. What I do know is that the wasps bred from the survivors,
but something wasn't right. Apart from the reversion to dimorphism, the
children didn't grow up normally. Some part of their brains hadn't
developed right."
"Meaning what?"
"They're morons. The wasps keep trying to fix things of course. That's why
the Splinterqueen will do everything to help Yarrow - and us, of course.
If she can study or even capture our thought patterns - and the demons
make that possible - maybe she can use them to imprint consciousness back
onto the Royalists. Like the Florentine architecture I said they copied,
right? That was one template, and Yarrow's mind will be another."
"That's supposed to cheer me up?"
"Look on the bright side. A while from now, there might be a whole
generation of people who think along lines laid down by Yarrow."
"Scary thought." Then wondered why I was able to crack a joke, with
destruction looming so close in the future. "Listen, I still don't get it.
What makes them want to bring life to the Swirl?"
"It seems to boil down to two...imperatives, I suppose you'd call them.
The first's simple enough. When wasps were first opening up Greater
Earth's solar system, back in the mid Twenty First Century, we sought the