"Charles Stross - Rogue Farm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

folks, no cars. Badgers and wild coypu and small, frightened wallabies roamed the
parching English countryside during the summer dry season. The water drew back to
expose an apron of cracked mud, planted with abandoned tin cans and a supermarket
trolley of precambrian vintage, its GPS tracker long since shorted out. The bones of the
technological epoch, poking from the treacherous surface of a fossil mud-bath. And
around the edge of the mimsy puddle, the stage trees grew.

Joe switched on his jammer and walked in among the spear-shaped conifers. Their
needles were matt black and fuzzy at the edges, fractally divided, the better to soak up
all the available light: a network of tap roots and fuzzy black grasslike stuff covered the
ground densely around them. Joe's breath wheezed noisily in his ears and he sweated
into the airtight suit as he worked, pumping a stream of colourless, smoking liquid at the
roots of each balistic trunk. The liquid fizzed and evaporated on contact: it seemed to
bleach the wood where it touched. Joe carefully avoided the stream: this stuff made him
uneasy. As did the trees, but liquid nitrogen was about the one thing he'd been able to
think of that was guaranteed to kill the trees stone dead without igniting them. After all,
they hadcores that were basically made of gun cotton -- highly explosive, liable to go off
if you subjected them to a sudden sharp impact or the friction of a chainsaw. The tree
he'd hit on creaked ominously, threatening to fall sideways, and Joe stepped round it,
efficiently squirting at the remaining roots. Right into the path of a distraught farm.

"My holy garden of earthly delights! My forest of the imaginative future! My delight, my
trees, my trees!" Eye stalks shot out and over, blinking down at him in horror as the
farm reared up on six or seven legs and pawed the air in front of him. "Destroyer of
saplings! Earth mother rapist! Bunny-strangling vivisectionist!"

"Back off," said Joe, dropping his cryogenic squirter and fumbling for his airgun.

The farm came down with a ground-shaking thump in front of him and stretched eyes
out to glare at him from both sides. They blinked, long black eyelashes fluttering across
angry blue irises. "How dare you?" demanded the farm. "My treasured seedlings!"

"Shut the fuck up," Joe grunted, shouldering his gun. "Think I'd let you burn my holding
when tha' rocket launched? Stay the fuck away," he added as a tentacle began to extend
from the farm's back.

"My crop," it moaned quietly: "my exile! Six more years around the sun chained to this
well of sorrowful gravity before next the window opens! No brains for Baby Jesus!
Defenestrator! We could have been so happy together if you hadn't fucked up! Who set
you up to this, Rat Lady?" It began to gather itself, muscles rippling under the leathery
mantle atop its leg cluster.

So Joe shot it.

Tubocurarine is a muscle relaxant: it paralyses skeletal muscles, the kind over which
human nervous systems typically exert conscious control. Etorphine is an insanely strong
opiate -- twelve hundred times as potent as heroin. Given time, a farm, with its alien
adaptive metabolism and consciously controlled proteome might engineer a defense
against the etorphine -- but Joe dosed his dart with enough to stun a blue whale, and he
had no intention of giving the farm enough time. It shuddered and went down on one