"Peter Watts - Blindsight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

We'd revert to our old selves soon enough. Just add water. For
now, though, the old slur was freshly relevant: the Undead really
did all look the same, if you didn't know how to look.
If you did, of courseтАФif you forgot appearance and watched for
motion, ignored meat and studied topologyтАФyou'd never mistake
one for another. Every facial tic was a data point, every
conversational pause spoke volumes more than the words to either
side. I could see James' personae shatter and coalesce in the flutter
of an eyelash. Szpindel's unspoken distrust of Amanda Bates
shouted from the corner of his smile. Every twitch of the
phenotype cried aloud to anyone who knew the language.
"Where'sтАФ" James croaked, coughed, waved one spindly arm at
Sarasti's empty coffin gaping at the end of the row.
Szpindel's lips cracked in a small rictus. "Gone back to Fab, eh?
Getting the ship to build some dirt to lie on."
"Probably communing with the Captain." Bates breathed louder
than she spoke, a dry rustle from pipes still getting reacquainted
with the idea of respiration.
Peter Watts 15 Blindsight

James again: "Could do that up here."
"Could take a dump up here, too," Szpindel rasped. "Some
things you do by yourself, eh?"
And some things you kept to yourself. Not many baselines felt
comfortable locking stares with a vampireтАФSarasti, ever
courteous, tended to avoid eye contact for exactly that reasonтАФbut
there were other surfaces to his topology, just as mammalian and
just as readable. If he had withdrawn from public view, maybe I
was the reason. Maybe he was keeping secrets.
After all, Theseus damn well was.

*

She'd taken us a good fifteen AUs towards our destination before
something scared her off course. Then she'd skidded north like a
startled cat and started climbing: a wild high three-gee burn off the
ecliptic, thirteen hundred tonnes of momentum bucking against
Newton's First. She'd emptied her Penn tanks, bled dry her
substrate mass, squandered a hundred forty days' of fuel in hours.
Then a long cold coast through the abyss, years of stingy
accounting, the thrust of every antiproton weighed against the drag
of sieving it from the void. Teleportation isn't magic: the Icarus
stream couldn't send us the actual antimatter it made, only the
quantum specs. Theseus had to filterfeed the raw material from
space, one ion at a time. For long dark years she'd made do on
pure inertia, hording every swallowed atom. Then a flip; ionizing
lasers strafing the space ahead; a ramscoop thrown wide in a hard
brake. The weight of a trillion trillion protons slowed her down
and refilled her gut and flattened us all over again. Theseus had
burned relentless until almost the moment of our resurrection.