"Sheri S. Tepper - Shadow's End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

He leaned forward, touching her lightly on the knee. "Did Leelson ever speak to you ofBernesohn
Famber?"

She was suddenly intrigued. "Oh, yes. Leelson's great-grandpop. One of the greatest of all Fastigats, to
hear Leelson tell it. A genius, a biochemist."

"Do you remember the name Tospia?"

Lutha smiled. "Bernesohn's longtime lover. A Fastiga woman, of course." She frowned. "A diva in solo
opera. Leelson played some of her sensurrounds for me. Very nice, though I think the senso-techs were
owed as much credit as Tospia herself. To my taste, one person's performance sensed six times,
however differentiated and augmented, does not have the interactive passion of six separate actors. I've
yet to experience one that has true eroticism."

The Procurator peered at her over the rim of his cup. "But Leelson never mentioned Bernesohn and the
Ularians?"

She gave the question to her subconscious, which came up empty. "I recall no connection."

He settled himself with a half-muffled groan. "I beg your patience:

"A century ago, there were twelve human populations on planets in Hermes Sector. Eleven of these
were only settlements, six of them homo-normed, the other five at the survey stage. The twelfth world,
Dinadh, had a planetary population. Dinadh is a small world, an unimportant world, except that it is near
us in a spaciotemporal sense, though not in an astrophysical one. Everything into and out of Hermes
Sector, including information, routes through Dinadh and did, even then.

"So, it was customary for freighters to land there, whether going or coming, and one did so a century
ago, bringing the news that two of the settlements in Hermes Sector had vanished. Prime sent six patrol
ships carrying investigative teams; two ships returned with news of further vanishments; the other four did
not return. We sent more men to find the lost menтАФfrequently a mistake, as in this case. None of them
returned. Dinadh's government, such as it is, refused to consider even partial evacuation, which would
have been the best we could do. Evacuating a populated planet is impossible. There aren't enough ships
to keep up with the birthrate." He sighed.

"And?" she prompted.

"Dinadh is the only occupied planet of its system, the only one suitable for occupation. The Alliance did
the only thing it could think of, englobing the system with unmanned sentinel buoys. We might as well
have done nothing, for all the good it did. No one came out of the sector toward Dinadh. Every probe
we sent into the sector from Dinadh simply disappeared.

"Ten standard years went by; then twenty, then thirty. Planets applying for colony rights were sent
elsewhere. Then, thirty-three standard years after the crisis, the sentinel buoys picked up a freighter
crossing the linefrom Hermes Sector into Dinadhi space! The holds were stuffed with homo-norm
equipment. The crew claimed they had found it abandoned and therefore salvageable, after falling into
Hermes Sector accidentally, through a rogue emergence. Later we checked for stellar collapse and found
an enormous one about the right timeтАФ"