"George Zebrowski - Stranger Suns" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zebrowski George)

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Copyright ┬й1991 George Zebrowski, Cover painting 1991 Bob Eggleton



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This edition is dedicated to

James Gunn and Pamela Pia,

who looked out for me.


I

THE STRENGTH OF SECRETS

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.
тАФBlaise Pascal


1

INDUSTRIAL PARK


Juan Obrion grasped the central guide bar and stopped his motion through the long tube leading from
sleep quarters in the spinning wheel to the isolated work sphere, high above the hub. As usual, he had not
slept well in the wheel's simulated half-g, waking up with the wordscentrifugal sleep begets coriolis
dreams playing in his head, defying him to guess their meaning. They still seemed to mock him as he
floated in place and peered out at the other components of the deteriorating industrial park orbiting a
choking, warming Earth that would soon be able to support only the most obviously practical projects.
Of the thirty bunched zero-g spheres, half had been empty since 2010. Four shuttles, abandoned six
years later for lack of maintenance, drifted against the glow of early morning in the Pacific.

He feared the slow dying of devotion within himself, the loss of his feeling for the work of science, which
he had once hoped would liberate him from the mill of power, greed, and survival that sooner or later
enslaved most people; even on the high road of ideals, death still waited along the way. Liberation was
beginning to look like an open grave.

He pulled up to a viewport so badly pitted by cosmic dust that it was impossible to see out. He tried to
see a chaos pattern in the complex etchings, and was reminded of a letter by a Russian named Tasarov in
a math journal, linking chaos and probability theory in a novel but untutored way. There's always a choice
to do your best, he insisted to himself.