"Cradle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur C., Lee Gentry)

1

Against the deep black background of scattered stars the filaments of the Milky Way Galaxy seem like thin wisps of light added by a master artist. Here, at the far edge of the Outer Shell, near the beginning of what the Colonists call the Gap, there is no suggestion of the teeming activity of the Colony, some twenty-four light millicycles away. An awesome, unbroken quiet is the background for the breathtaking beauty of a black sky studded with twinkling stars.

Suddenly out of the void comes a small interstellar messenger robot. It seeks and finally finds a dark spherical satellite about three miles in diameter that is easily overlooked in the great panorama of the celestial sky. Time passes. A close-up reveals activity on the satellite. Soft artificial lights now illuminate portions of the surface. Automated vehicles are working on the periphery of the object, apparently changing its shape. External structures are dismantled and taken off to a temporary storage area in the distance. At length the original satellite disappears altogether and what is left are two long parallel rails of metal alloy, built in sections of about two hundred yards apiece from the spare parts of the now vanished satellite. Each rail is ten yards across and separated from its matched partner by about a hundred yards.

Regular sorties to the storage area continue until the useful supplies of material are depleted and the tracks extend for a distance of almost ten miles. Then activity stops. The rails from nowhere to nowhere in space stand as mute reminders of some major engineering activity suddenly abandoned. Or was it? From just below a prominent binary pair, the two brightest lights in the eastern sky, a speck emerges. The speck grows until it dominates the eastern quadrant of the sky. A dozen, no, sixteen great interstellar cargo ships with bright, flashing red lights lead a procession of robot vehicles into the region. The ghostly rails to nowhere are surrounded by the new arrivals. The first cargo ship opens and eight small shuttles emerge, each one moving back down the line toward another of the great cargo containers. The shuttles wait silently outside the huge ships while the entourage completes its arrival.

The final vehicle to arrive is a tiny space tug pulling a long, slender object that looks like two folded Japanese fans joined together end to end. It is encased in a transparent and protective sheath of very thin material. Eight small, darting vehicles dance like hummingbirds along its entire length, as if they were somehow guiding it, guarding it, and checking out its health all at the same time.

The large cargo ships shaped like ancient blimps now open and reveal their contents. Most of them are carrying rail sections stacked in enormous piles. The small shuttles unload the sections, leaving them stacked, and set them in groups stretching for miles in both directions from the existing rails. When the rail sections are almost all unloaded, four of the shuttles approach the side of one of the remaining giant cargo ships and wait for the bay doors to swing open. From the inside of this cargo ship come eight machines that attack each of the four shuttles in pairs, breaking them carefully into pieces and taking the parts back into the dark of the cargo bay. A few moments later, an elongated complex of articulating machinery emerges from this great ship. Once released from the confines of the cargo carrier, it stretches itself into a long bench reaching almost a mile in length. Every hundred yards or so along the central platform of this bench, a smaller set of coordinated components form into highly organized local groups.

This is the automated, multipurpose construction system, one of the technological treasures of the Colonists. The entire system moves into place at the end of the tracks and its many remote manipulators begin to pull rail sections from the various stacks. Its sophisticated local hands and fingers deftly put the new sections in place and attach them with atomic welds. The speed is astonishing. An entire mile of new track is finished within minutes and the great builder moves to another group of rail section piles. The completed tracks extend for almost a hundred miles in space.

Having finished with one task, the construction system undergoes its next metamorphosis. Tearing itself into pieces starting from the two ends of the long bench, the monolithic structure disappears and is reorganized into thousands of separate but similar components. These little antlike contraptions attach themselves in groups to individual rail sections. They measure carefully all the dimensions and check all the welds between adjacent sections. Then, as if on cue, the rails on the four ends of the track segments begin to bend and elevate, lifted by the antlike components. The rails twist upward, upward, bringing the rest of the track with them. The two long parallel lines are eventually transformed into a giant double hoop, over ten miles in radius, that looks like an amusement park ferris wheel suspended in space.

With the completion of the double hoop, the construction system again reconfigures itself. Some of the new elements of the system pick up the long slender object shaped like end-to-end Japanese fans. They erect it near the hoop (it is, not surprisingly, almost the exact length as the diameter of the hoops) under the careful surveillance of its hummingbird protectors. Then the object is hoist into place as a north-south spoke in the double hoop structure. Some of the hummingbirds produce unseen thin cables and anchor the spoke to the hoop structure at both ends. The rest of the tiny mechanical speedsters create a web that winds around the center section and connects the great antenna with the east-west axis of the hoops.

The antenna, now connected to its supporting structure, opens slowly at both the north and south pole positions on the hoop. Closer inspection reveals that the hummingbirds are actually pulling the delicate individual folds apart. The folds spread out until the entire interior of the hoops is covered with a mixture of mesh, ribbing, and amazingly complex local arrays. The initial deployment is complete.

The communication complex next goes through an elaborate self-test while its construction minions stand by in case any problems are encountered. The tests are successful and the station is declared operational. Within hours the phalanx of robot emissaries from the inhabited universe picks up all the stray metal lying around and packs it into one of the large cargo ships. Then, as swiftly as they came, the robot vehicles disappear into the blackness around the station, leaving the imposing hoop structure alone as a reminder of the presence of intelligence in the universe.

Around the vast Outer Shell, whose two hundred and fifty-six sections each contain more volume than the Colony, over one thousand similar upgrades have been made during Cycle 446 in an attempt to extend advanced communications capabilities to new locales. This is the last upgrade of a very difficult group in a region near the Gap. This group was delayed several times because of an unacceptably high number of manufacturing deficiencies at the nearest major factory over two light millicycles away. After several attempts to diagnose and repair the problems, eventually the plant had to be closed and virtually rebuilt from scratch. The total delay to the completion of the project was fourteen millicycles, just about what the Council of Engineers had predicted in their worst-case analysis that accompanied the Cycle 446 Proclamation.

As the big moment approaches, all normal activity in the heart of the Colony ceases. In the last nanocycle, there is no business activity, no entertainment. The spaceports are even empty. At precisely 446.9, after two hundred millicycles of debate and discussion by the Council of Leaders, the governmental blueprint for the next era will be delivered and all intelligence in the Colony will be listening.

The giant transmitter is activated on schedule and the Cycle 447 Proclamation pours out at an information rate of a hundred trillion bits of information per picocycle. The actual data rate from the powerful source is much higher, but the information rate is reduced to accommodate requirements for both sophisticated encoding and error checks internal to the data. With the coding, only Colony receivers equipped with special decryption algorithms can unscramble the message at any level. And the internal consistency checks on each packet of data in the transmission reduce the probability of receiving an erroneous piece of information, even at an enormous distance, to practically zero.

Following the organization and agenda for The Proclamation established in the Era of Genius, between Cycles 371 and 406, the first microcycle of the transmission is a complete summary of the entire plan. Two hundred nanocycles of this summary are devoted to each of the five divisions governed by the Council of Leaders: administration, information, communication, transportation, and exploration. After a planned break of four hundred nanocycles, to allow receiver adjustments along the path of the signal, the transmission of the actual Cycle 447 Proclamation begins. On and on it goes. It does not stop until twenty microcycles later. Four complete microcycles are used for in-depth explanations of the major projects to be undertaken in each of the five disciplines. Of particular interest to the Committee for the Outer Shell, the group that governs the huge concentric region defining the most distant reach where the Colonists claim jurisdiction, is a plan from the Division of Exploration announcing the repatriation to the Outer Shell of almost a million species from Zoo System #3.

(The transmission of The Proclamation, a wealth of information that can be translated into language, pictures, sounds, and other sensory impressions depending on the receiving beings and the sophistication of their decryption equipment, is the beginning of the governmental process for each cycle. Based upon The Proclamation, regional bodies or administrative agencies with subordinate jurisdictions then adjust their plans for the cycle to be consistent with those announced by the Council of Leaders. This procedure is defined in detail in the Articles of Colonial Confederation.)

The Proclamation is relayed throughout the Colony and the near reaches of the Inner Shell by means of giant communication stations along the developed transportation routes. These stations, actually information centers that store all Colony messages in their extensive libraries for as long as a hundred cycles, amplify and retransmit the signal to the next station in the pattern some ten light microcycles away. The edge of the Colony (and hence the beginning of the Inner Shell) was expanded by the Boundary Decree in the Cycle 416 Proclamation to include all points up to three light millicycles from the administrative center. Thus, by the time the Proclamation reaches the mammoth Zoo Complex, a combination of three stars and nineteen planets (four of them artificial) just across the edge of the Colony, the message has been relayed through three hundred stations.

The Committee of Zookeepers eagerly awaits the proclamation to find out the response to their recommended expansion of the Zoo Complex. They are surprised to find their proposal replaced by another repatriation plan. Once before, in Cycle 429, they had proposed an expansion of the zoo to handle the explosion of successful progeny created by the breakthroughs in adaptive genetic engineering during Cycles 426-428. At that time also their request had been denied and the Council of Leaders had recommended repatriation to solve the population problem. During Cycles 430-436 the population of the Zoo Complex was kept approximately constant by these regular transfers of common species back to their original homes.

But starting with Cycle 437, there was a rapid increase in interest in comparative biology. It was triggered by the discovery of a fifth class of life form, called Type E by the Council of Biologists, in Section 28 of the Outer Shell. Subsequent expeditions to the same area showed not only that the dominant life type throughout Sections 28-33 was Type E. but also that Type A was surprisingly present as well in those sections. This was the first time that natural evolution in any region had shown a predilection for any kind of life form other than the Type A of the Colonists and its developed hybrids. The quest to understand these unusual creatures led to the endangered species expeditions in the Outer Shell in Cycles 440 and 441 and the creation, in Cycle 442, of several worlds specifically to study the new Type E life forms.

Many of these new species flourished in Zoo System #3, causing population and space problems again for the Committee of Zookeepers. The space shortage was especially severe and it was exacerbated both by the need to segregate all the Type E life forms and by their rapid reproduction. Therefore, at the beginning of the planning process for this Cycle 447, the Committee of Zookeepers had proposed their small expansion of the Zoo Complex, suggesting not only a fourth zoo system completely dedicated to Type E life forms, but also a vigorous campaign for completing the repatriation of all Colony and Inner Shell species with aggression coefficients below 14.

The Committee of Zookeepers are stunned by the scale of the Outer Shell repatriation plan contained in the Cycle 447 Proclamation. In a lively technical discussion catalyzed by the unexpected proposal, the dangers of returning the Outer Shell life forms to their original planets are vigorously reasserted. The Committee decides tentatively to take an unusual step-to submit a Proclamation Variance to the Council of Leaders. In the draft variance the Zookeepers point out that many genetic experiments have been conducted with the new Type E forms, that the evolutionary possibilities for the new species are therefore uncertain, that the monitoring frequencies and test facilities in the Outer Shell are inadequate, and that the aggression coefficients for many of the group are not yet accurately tabulated.

Before they actually submit the variance, however, the Committee of Zookeepers realizes that someone must have pointed out all these factors in the original debates. So why was the repatriation policy promulgated? Was this part of some new overarching design that downgrades the importance of zoological information altogether? Or is the policy strictly political and possibly connected with the Message from Power #2?