"Dan Simmons - Orphans of the Helix" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

"It looks wrong," said Dem Lia.
"This is the anomaly that added to the urgency of the distress signal and decided us to bring
you out of deep sleep," said Saigy├┤, his voice sounding slightly bemused again. "This orbital
forest ring is not of Ouster or Templar bioconstruction."
Doctor Samel Ria Kem Ali whistled softly. "An alien-built forest ring. But with human-descended
Ousters living on it."
"And there is something else we have found since entering the system," said Saigy├┤. Suddenly
the left window was filled with a view of a machine -- a spacecraft -- so huge and ungainly that
it almost defied description. An image of the Helix was superimposed at the bottom of the screen
to give scale. The Helix was a kilometer long. The base of this other spacecraft was at least a
thousand times as long. The monster was huge and broad, bulbous and ugly, carbon black and
insectoidal, bearing the worst features of both organic evolution and industrial manufacture.
Centered in the front of it was what appeared to be a steel-toothed maw, a rough opening lined
with a seemingly endless series of mandibles and shredding blades and razor-sharp rotors.
"It looks like God's razor," said Patek Georg Dem Mio, the cool irony undercut slightly by a
just-perceptible quaver in his voice.
"God's razor my ass," said Jon Mikail Dem Alem softly. As an ebony, life support was one of his
specialties, and he had grown up tending the huge farms on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. "That's a
threshing machine from hell."
"Where is it?" Dem Lia started to ask, but already Saigy├┤ had thrown the plot on the holo
showing their deceleration trajectory in toward the forest ring. The obscene machine-ship was
coming in from above the ecliptic, was some twenty-eight AU's ahead of them, was decelerating
rapidly but not nearly as aggressively as the Helix, and was headed directly for the Ouster forest
ring. The trajectory plot was clear -- at its current rate of deceleration, the machine would
directly intercept the ring in nine standard days.
"This may be the cause of their distress signal," the other green, Res Sandre, said dryly.
"If it were coming at me or my world, I'd scream so loudly that you'd hear me two hundred and
twenty-eight light-years away without a radio," said the young white-band, Den Soa.
"If we started picking up this weak signal some two hundred twenty-eight light-years ago," said
Patek Georg, "it means that either that thing has been decelerating in-system very slowly, or ...
"
"It's been here before," said Dem Lia. She ordered the AI to opaque the windows and to dismiss
itself from their company. "Shall we assign roles, duties, priorities, and make initial
decisions?" she said softly.
The other eight around the table nodded soberly.
To a stranger, to someone outside the Spectrum Helix culture, the next five minutes would have
been very hard to follow. Total consensus was reached within the first two minutes, but only a
small part of the discussion was through talk. The combination of hand gestures, body language,
shorthand phrases, and silent nods that had evolved through four centuries of a culture determined
to make decisions through consensus worked well here. These people's parents and grandparents knew
the necessity of command structure and discipline -- half a million of their people had died in
the short but nasty war with the Pax remnant on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, and then another hundred
thousand when the fleeing Pax vandals came looting through their system some thirty years later.
But they were determined to elect command through consensus and thereafter make as many decisions
as possible through the same means.
In the first two minutes, assignments were settled and the subtleties around the duties dealt
with.
Dem Lia was to be in command. Her single vote could override consensus when necessary. The
other green, Res Sandre, preferred to monitor propulsion and engineering, working with the
reticent AI named Basho to use this time out of Hawking space to good advantage in taking stock.