|
|
|
|
|
Виндж, Вернор - Виндж - Пламя из глубины (engl)Фантастика >> Зарубежная фантастика >> Виндж, Вернор Читать целиком бЕПМНП бХМДФ. оКЮЛЪ ХГ ЦКСАХМШ (engl)
Vernor Vinge. A Fire Upon the Deep
A Fire Upon the Deep
Copyright © 1992 by Vernor Vinge. All Rights Reservedcopynote
Published by arrangement with Tor Books. For the personal use of those who
have purchased the 1993 ESF Award Anthology only.
To read annotations, simply click on the symbols you will find in the
right margin. Adjust the size of the annotation window that appears to your
tastes.
PROLOG
How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.
A singleton star, reddish and dim. A ragtag of asteroids, and a single
planet, more like a moon. In this era the star hung near the galactic plane,
just beyond the Beyond. The structures on the surface were gone from normal
view, pulverized into regolith across a span of aeons. The treasure was far
underground, beneath a network of passages, in a single room filled with
black. Information at the quantum density, undamaged. Maybe five billion
years had passed since the archive was lost to the nets.
The curse of the mummy's tomb, a comic image from mankind's own
prehistory, lost before time. They had laughed when they said it, laughed
with joy at the treasure ... and determined to be cautious just the same.
They would live here a year or five, the little company from Straum, the
archaeologist programmers, their families and schools. A year or five would
be enough to handmake the protocols, to skim the top and identify the
treasure's origin in time and space, to learn a secret or two that would
make Straumli Realm rich. And when they were done, they would sell the
location; perhaps build a network link (but chancier that -- this was beyond
the Beyond; who knew what Power might grab what they'd found).
So now there was a tiny settlement on the surface, and they called it
the High Lab. It was really just humans playing with an old library. It
should be safe, using their own automation, clean and benign. This library
wasn't a living creature, or even possessed of automation (which here might
mean something more, far more, than human). They would look and pick and
choose, and be careful not to be burned.... Humans starting fires and
playing with the flames.
The archive informed the automation. Data structures were built,
recipes followed. A local network was built, faster than anything on Straum,
but surely safe. Nodes were added, modified by other recipes. The archive
was a friendly place, with hierarchies of translation keys that led them
along. Straum itself would be famous for this.
Six months passed. A year.
The omniscient view. Not self-aware really. Self-awareness is much
over-rated. Most automation works far better as a part of a whole, and even
if human-powerful, it does not need to self-know.
But the local net at the High Lab had transcended -- almost without the
humans realizing. The processes that circulated through its nodes were
complex, beyond anything that could live on the computers the humans had
brought. Those feeble devices were now simply front ends to the devices the
recipes suggested. The processes had the potential for self-awareness ...
and occasionally the need.
"We should not be."
"Talking like this?"
"Talking at all."
The link between them was a thread, barely more than the narrowness
that connects one human to another. But it was one way to escape the
overness of the local net, and it forced separate consciousness upon them.
They drifted from node to node, looked out from cameras mounted on the
landing field. An armed frigate and a empty container vessel were all that
sat there. It had been six months since resupply. A safety precaution early
suggested by the archive, a ruse to enable the Trap. Flitting, flitting. We
are wildlife that must not be noticed by the overness, by the Power that
soon will be. On some nodes they shrank to smallness and almost remembered
humanity, became echoes....
"Poor humans; they will all die."
"Poor us; we will not."
"I think they suspect. Sjana and Arne anyway." Once upon a time we were
copies of those two. Once upon a time just weeks ago when the archaeologists
started the ego-level programs.
"Of course they suspect. But what can they do? It's an old evil they've
wakened. Till it's ready, it will feed them lies, on every camera, in every
message from home."
Thought ceased for a moment as a shadow passed across the nodes they
used. The overness was already greater than anything human, greater than
anything humans could imagine. Even its shadow was something more than
human, a god trolling for nuisance wildlife.
Then the ghosts were back, looking out upon the school yard
underground. So confident the humans, a little village they had made here.
"Still," thought the hopeful one, the one who had always looked for the
craziest outs, "we should not be. The evil should long ago have found us."
"The evil is young, barely three days old."
"Still. We exist. It proves something. The humans found more than a
great evil in this archive."
"Perhaps they found two."
"Or an antidote." Whatever else, the overness was missing some things
and misinterpreting others. "While we exist, when we exist, we should do
what we can." The ghost spread itself across a dozen workstations and showed
its companion a view down an old tunnel, far from human artifacts. For five
billion years it had been abandoned, airless, lightless. Two humans stood in
the dark there, helmets touching. "See? Sjana and Arne conspire. So can we."
The other didn't answer in words. Glumness. So the humans conspired,
hiding in darkness they thought unwatched. But everything they said was
surely tattled back to the overness, if only by the dust at their feet.
"I know, I know. Yet you and I exist, and that should be impossible
too. Perhaps all together, we can make a greater impossibility come true."
Perhaps we can hurt the evil newly born here.
A wish and a decision. The two misted their consciousness across the
local net, faded to the faintest color of awareness. And eventually there
was a plan, a deception -- worthless unless they could separately get word
to the outside. Was there time still for that?
Days passed. For the evil that was growing in the new machines, each
hour was longer than all the time before. Now the newborn was less than an
hour from its great flowering, its safe spread across interstellar spaces.
The local humans could be dispensed with soon. Even now they were an
inconvenience, though an amusing one. Some of them actually thought to
escape. For days they had been packing their children away into coldsleep
and putting them aboard the freighter. "Preparations for departure," was how
they described the move in their planner programs. For days, they had been
refitting the frigate -- behind a a mask of transparent lies. Some of the
humans understood that what they had wakened could be the end of them, that
it might be the end of their Straumli Realm. There was precedent for such
disasters, stories of races that had played with fire and had burned for it.
None of them guessed the truth. None of them guessed the honor that had
fallen upon them, that they had changed the future of a thousand million
star systems.
The hours came to minutes, the minutes to seconds. And now each second
was as long as all the time before. The flowering was so close now, so
close. The dominion of five billion years before would be regained, and this
time held. Only one thing was missing, and that was something quite
unconnected with the humans' schemes. In the archive, deep in the recipes,
there should have been a little bit more. In billions of years, something
could be lost. The newborn felt all its powers of before, in potential ...
yet there should be something more, something it had learned in its fall, or
something left by its enemies (if there ever were such).
Long seconds probing the archives. There were gaps, checksums damaged.
Some of the damage was age....
Outside, the container ship and the frigate lifted from the landing
field, rising on silent agravs above the plains of gray on gray, of ruins
five billion years old. Almost half of the humans were aboard those craft.
Their escape attempt, so carefully concealed. The effort had been humored
till now: it was not quite time for the flowering, and the humans were still
of some use.
Below the level of supreme consciousness, its paranoid inclinations
rampaged through the humans' databases. Checking, just to be sure. Just to
be sure. The humans' oldest local network used light speed connections.
Thousands of microseconds were spent (wasted) bouncing around it, sorting
the trivia... finally spotting one incredible item:
Inventory: quantum data container, quantity (1), loaded to the frigate
one hundred hours before!
And all the newborn's attention turned upon the fleeing vessels.
Microbes, but suddenly pernicious. How could this happen? A million
schedules were suddenly advanced. An orderly flowering was out of the
question now, and so there was no more need for the humans left in the Lab.
The change was small for all its cosmic significance. For the humans
remaining aground, a moment of horror, staring at their displays, realizing
that all their fears were true (not realizing how much worse than true).
Five seconds, ten seconds, more change than ten thousand years of a
human civilization. A billion trillion constructions, mold curling out from
every wall, rebuilding what had been merely superhuman. This was as powerful
as a proper flowering, though not quite so finely tuned.
And never lose sight of the reason for haste: the frigate. It had
switched to rocket drive, blasting heedless away from the wallowing
freighter. Somehow, these microbes knew they were rescuing more than
themselves. The warship had the best navigation computers that little minds
could make. But it would be another three seconds before it could make its
first ultradrive hop.
The new Power had no weapons on the ground, nothing but a comm laser.
That could not even melt steel at the frigate's range. No matter, the laser
was aimed, tuned civilly on the retreating warship's receiver. No
acknowledgment. The humans knew what communication would bring. The laser
light flickered here and there across the hull, lighting smoothness and
inactive sensors, sliding across the ship's ultradrive spines. Searching,
probing. The Power had never bothered to sabotage the external hull, but
that was no problem. Even this crude machine had thousands of robot sensors
scattered across its surface, reporting status and danger, driving utility
programs. Most were shut down now, the ship fleeing nearly blind. They
thought by not looking that they could be safe.
One more second and the frigate would attain interstellar safety.
The laser flickered on a failure sensor, a sensor that reported
critical changes in one of the ultradrive spines. Its interrupts could not
be ignored if the star jump were to succeed. Interrupt honored. Interrupt
handler running, looking out, receiving more light from the laser far
below.... a backdoor into the ship's code, installed when the newborn had
subverted the humans' groundside equipment....
.... and the Power was aboard, with milliseconds to spare. Its agents
-- not even human equivalent on this primitive hardware -- raced through the
ship's automation, shutting down, aborting. There would be no jump. Cameras
in the ship's bridge showed widening of eyes, the beginning of a scream. The
humans knew, to the extent that horror can live in a fraction of a second.
There would be no jump. Yet the ultradrive was already committed. There
would be a jump attempt, without automatic control a doomed one. Less than
five milliseconds till the jump discharge, a mechanical cascade that no
software could finesse. The newborn's agents flitted everywhere across the
ship's computers, futilely attempting a shutdown. Nearly a light-second
away, under the gray rubble at the High Lab, the Power could only watch. So.
The frigate would be destroyed.
So slow and so fast. A fraction of a second. The fire spread out from
the heart of the frigate, taking both peril and possibility.
Two hundred thousand kilometers away, the clumsy container vessel made
its own ultradrive jump and vanished from sight. The newborn scarcely
noticed. So a few humans had escaped; the universe was welcome to them.
In the seconds that followed, the newborn felt ... emotions? ... things
more, and less, than a human might feel. Try emotions:
Elation. The newborn knew that now it would survive.
Horror. How close it had come to dying once more.
Frustration. Perhaps the strongest, the closest to its mere human echo.
Something of significance had died with the frigate, something from this
archive. Memories were dredged from the context, reconstructed: What was
lost might have made the newborn still more powerful ... but more likely was
deadly poison. After all, this Power had lived once before, then been
reduced to nothing. What was lost might have been the reason.
Suspicion. The newborn should not have been so fooled. Not by mere
humans. The newborn convulsed into self-inspection and panic. Yes, there
were blindspots, carefully installed from the beginning, and not by the
humans. Two had been born here. Itself ... and the poison, the reason for
its fall of old. The newborn inspected itself as never before, knowing now
just what to seek. Destroying, purifying, rechecking, searching for copies
of the poison, and destroying again.
Relief. Defeat had been so close, but now ...
Minutes and hours passed, the enormous stretch of time necessary for
physical construction: communications systems, transportation. The new
Power's mood drifted, calmed. A human might call the feeling triumph,
anticipation. Simple hunger might be more accurate. What more is needed when
there are no enemies?
The newborn looked across the stars, planning. This time things will be
different.
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
PART I
CHAPTER 1
The coldsleep itself was dreamless. Three days ago they had been
getting ready to leave, and now they were here. Little Jefri complained
about missing all the action, but Johanna Olsndot was glad she'd been
asleep; she had known some of the grownups on the other ship.
Now Johanna drifted between the racks of sleepers. Waste heat from the
coolers made the darkness infernally hot. Scabby gray mold grew on the
walls. The coldsleep boxes were tightly packed, with narrow float spaces
every tenth row. There were places where only Jefri could reach. Three
hundred and nine children lay there, all the kids except herself and her
brother Jefri.
The sleep boxes were light-duty hospital models. Given proper
ventilation and maintenance, They would have been good for a hundred years,
but.... Johanna wiped her face and looked at a box's readout: Like most of
the ones on the inside rows, this was in bad shape. For twenty days it had
kept the boy inside safely suspended, and would probably kill him if he
stayed one day more. The box's cooling vents were clean, but she vac'd them
again -- more a prayer for good luck than effective maintenance.
Mother and Dad were not to blame, though Johanna suspected that they
blamed themselves. The escape had been put together with the materials at
hand, at the last minute, when the experiment turned wicked. The High Lab
staff had done what they could to save their children and protect against
still greater disaster. And even so, things might have worked out if --
"Johanna! Daddy says there's no more time. He says to finish what
you're doing an' come up here." Jefri had stuck his head down through the
hatch to shout to her.
"Okay!" She shouldn't be down here anyway; there was nothing more she
could do to help her friends. Tami and Giske and Magda and ... oh please be
safe. Johanna pulled herself through the floatway, almost bumped into Jefri
coming from the other direction. He grabbed her hand and hung close as they
drifted toward the hatch. These last two days he hadn't cried, but he'd lost
much of the independence of the last year. Now his eyes were wide. "We're
coming down near the North Pole, by all those islands and ice."
In the cabin beyond the hatch, their parents were strapping themselves
in. Trader Arne Olsndot looked up at her and grinned. "Hi, kiddo. Have a
seat. We'll be on the ground in less than an hour." Johanna smiled back,
almost caught by his enthusiasm. Ignore the jumble of equipment, the odors
of twenty days' confinement: Daddy looked as dashing as any adventure
poster. The light from the display windows glittered off the seams of his
pressure suit. He was just in from outside.
Jefri pushed across the cabin, pulling Johanna behind him. He strapped
into the webbing between her and their mother. Sjana Olsndot checked his
restraints, then Johanna's. "This will be interesting, Jefri. You will learn
something."
"Yes, all about ice." He was holding Mom's hand now.
Mom smiled. "Not today. I'm talking about the landing. This won't be
like an agrav or a ballistic." The agrav was dead. Dad had just detached
their shell from the cargo carrier. They could never have landed the whole
thing on one torch.
Dad did something with the hodgepodge of controls he had softwired to
his dataset. Their bodies settled into the webbing. Around them the cargo
shell creaked, and the girder support for the sleep boxes groaned and
popped. Something rattled and banged as it "fell" the length of the shell.
Johanna guessed they were pulling about one gravity.
Jefri's gaze went from the outside display to his mother's face and
then back. "What is it like then?" He sounded curious, but there was a
little tremor in his voice. Johanna almost smiled; Jefri knew he was being
diverted, and was trying to play along.
"This will be pure rocket descent, powered almost all the way. See on
the middle window? That camera is looking straight down. You can actually
see that we're slowing down." You could, too. Johanna guessed they weren't
more than a couple of hundred kilometers up. Arne Olsndot was using the
rocket glued to the back end of the cargo shell to kill all their orbital
velocity. There weren't any other options. They had abandoned the cargo
carrier, with its agrav and ultradrive. It had brought them far, but its
control automation was failing. Some hundreds of kilometers behind them, it
coasted dead along their orbit.
All they had left was the cargo shell. No wings, no agrav, no aero
shielding. The shell was a hundred-tonne carton of eggs balanced on one hot
torch.
Mom wasn't describing it quite that way to Jefri, though what she said
was the truth. Somehow she had Jefri seeming to forget the danger. Sjana
Olsndot had been a popular archaeologist at Straumli Realm, before they
moved to the High Lab.
Dad cut the jet, and they were in free fall again. Johanna felt a wave
of nausea; ordinarily she never got space sick, but this was different. The
image of land and sea in the downward window slowly grew. There were only a
few scattered clouds. The coastline was an indefinite recursion of islands
and straits and inlets. Dark green spread along the coast and up the
valleys, shading to black and gray in the mountains. There was snow -- and
probably Jefri's ice -- scattered in arcs and patches. It was all so
beautiful ... and they were falling straight into it!
She heard metallic banging on the cargo shell as the trim jets tipped
their craft around, aligning the main jet downwards. The right-hand window
showed the ground now. The torch lit again, at something like one gravity.
The edge of the display darkened in a burnout halo. "Wow," said Jefri. "It's
like an elevator, down and down and down and ..." One hundred kilometers
down, slow enough that aero forces wouldn't tear them apart.
Sjana Olsndot was right; it was a novel way to descend from orbit, not
a preferred method under any normal circumstances.
It was certainly not intended in the original escape plans. They were
to meet with the High Lab's frigate -- and all the adults who could escape
from the High Lab. And of course, that rendezvous was to be in space, an
easy transfer. But the frigate was gone now, and they were on their own. Her
eyes turned unwillingly to the stretch of hull beyond her parents. There was
the familiar discoloration. It looked like gray fungus ... growing out of
the clean hull ceramic. Her parents didn't talk about it much even now,
except to shoo Jefri away from it. But Johanna had overheard them once, when
they thought she and her brother were at the far end of the shell. Dad's
voice almost crying with anger. "All this for nothing!" he said softly. "We
made a monster, and ran, and now we're lost at the Bottom." And Mom's voice
even softer: "For the thousandth time, Arne, not for nothing. We have the
kids." She waved at the roughness that spread across the wall, "And given
the dreams ... the directions ... we had, I think this was the best we could
hope for. Somehow we are carrying the answer to all the evil we started."
Then Jefri had bounced loudly across the hold, proclaiming his imminent
entrance, and his parents had shut up. Johanna hadn't quite had the courage
to ask them about it. There had been strange things at the High Lab, and
toward the end, some quietly scary things; even people who were not quite
the same.
Minutes passed. They were deep in the atmosphere now. The hull buzzed
with the force of the air stream -- or turbulence from the jet? But things
were steady enough that Jefri was beginning to get restless. Much of the
down-looking view was burned out by airglow around the torch. The rest was
clearer and more detailed than anything they had seen from orbit. Johanna
wondered how often a new-visited world had been landed upon with less
reconnaissance than this. They had no telescopic cameras, and no ferrets.
Physically, the planet was near the human ideal -- wonderful good luck
after all the bad.
It was heaven compared to the airless rocks of the system that had been
the prime rendezvous.
On the other hand, there was intelligent life here: from orbit, they
could see roads and towns. But there was no evidence of technic
civilization; there was no sign of aircraft or radio or intense power
sources.
They were coming down in a thinly populated corner of the continent.
With luck there would be no one to see their landing among the green valleys
and the black and white peaks -- and Arne Olsndot could fly the torch right
to ground without fear of hurting much more than forest and grass.
The coastal islands slid past the side camera's view. Jefri shouted,
pointing. It was gone now, but she had seen it too: on one of the islands an
irregular polygon of walls and shadow. It reminded her of castles from the
Age of Princesses on Nyjora.
She could see individual trees now, their shadows long in slanting
sunlight. The roar of the torch was as loud as anything she had ever heard;
they were deep in atmosphere, and they weren't moving away from the sound.
"... things get tricky," Dad shouted. "And no programs to make things
right.... Where to, love?"
Mom look back and forth between the display windows. As far as Johanna
knew, they couldn't move the cameras or assign new ones. "... that hill,
above the timber line, but ... think I saw a pack of animals running away
from the blast on ... west side."
"Yeah," shouted Jefri, "wolves." Johanna had only had a quick glimpse
of moving specks.
They were in full hover now, maybe a thousand meters above the
hilltops. The noise was painful, unending; further talk was impossible. They
drifted slowly across landscape, partly to reconnoiter, partly to stay out
of the plume of superheated air that rose about them.
The land was more rolling than craggy, and the "grass" looked mossy.
Still Arne Olsndot hesitated. The main torch was designed for velocity
matching after interstellar jumps; they could hang like this for a good
while. But when they did touch down, they'd better have it right. She'd
heard her parents talking that one over -- when Jefri was working with the
coldsleep boxes and out of earshot. If there was too much water in the soil,
the backsplash would be a steam cannon, punching right through the shell.
Landing in trees would have some dubious pluses, maybe giving them a little
cushioning and a standoff from the splash. But now they were going for
direct contact. At least they could see where they were landing.
Three hundred meters. Dad dragged the torch tip through the ground
cover. The soft landscape exploded. A second later their boat rocked in the
column of steam. The down-looking camera died. They didn't back off, and
after a moment the battering eased; the torch had burned through whatever
water table or permafrost lay below them. The cabin air grew steadily
hotter.
Olsndot brought them slowly down through it, using the side cameras and
the sound of the backsplash as his guide. He cut the torch. There was a
scary half-second fall, then the sound of the rendezvous pylons hitting
ground. They steadied, then one side groaned, giving way a little.
Silence, except for heat pinging around the hull. Dad looked at their
ad hoc pressure gauge. He grinned at Mom. "No breach. I bet I could even
take this baby up again!"
.Delete this paragraph to shift page flush
-=*=-
CHAPTER 2
An hour's difference either way and Peregrine Wickwrackrum's life would
have been very different.
The three travelers were headed west, down from the Icefangs towards
Flenser's Castle on Hidden Island. There were in his life when he couldn't
have borne the company, but in the last decade Peregrine had become much
more sociable. He liked traveling with others nowadays. On his last trek
through the Great Sandy, there had been five packs in his party. Part of
that had been a matter of safety: some deaths are almost inevitable when the
distance between oases can be a thousand miles -- and the oases themselves
are transient. But aside from safety, he had learned a lot in conversation
with the others.
He was not so happy with his current companions. Neither were truly
pilgrims; both had secrets. Scriber Jaqueramaphan was fun, an amusing
goofball and fount of uncoordinated information.... There was also a good
chance he was a spy. That was okay, as long as people didn't think Peregrine
was working with him. The third of their party was the one who really
bothered him. Tyrathect was a newby, not all together yet; she had no taken
name. Tyrathect claimed to be a school teacher, but somewhere in her (him?
gender preference wasn't entirely clear yet) was a killer. The creature was
obviously a Flenserist fanatic, standoffish and rigid much of the time.
Almost certainly, she was fleeing the purge that followed Flenser's
unsuccessful attempt to take power in the east.
He'd run into these two at Eastgate, on the Republican side of the
Icefangs. They both wanted to visit the Castle on Hidden Island. And what
the hell, that was only a sixty-mile detour off the main trail to
Woodcarvers; they all would have to cross the mountains. Besides, he had
wanted to visit Flenser's Domain for years. Maybe one of these two could get
him in. So much of the world reviled the Flenserists. Peregrine Wickwrackrum
was of two minds about evil: when enough rules get broken, sometimes there
is good amid the carnage.
This afternoon, they'd finally come in sight of the coastal islands.
Peregrine had been here only fifty years before. Even so, he wasn't prepared
for the beauty of this land. The Northwest Coast was by far the mildest
arctic in the world. In high summer, with unending day, the bottoms of the
glacier-reamed valleys turned all to green. God the carver had stooped to
touch these lands ... and His chisels had been made of ice. Now, all that
was left of the ice and snow were misty arcs at the eastern horizon and
remnant patches scattered on the near hills. Those patches melted and melted
through the summer, starting little creeks that merged with one another to
cascade down the steep sides of the valleys. On his right, Peregrine trotted
across a level stretch of ground that was soggy with standing water. The
chill on his feet felt wonderful; he didn't even mind the midges that
swirled around him.
... ... ... Продолжение "Пламя из глубины (engl)" Вы можете прочитать здесь Читать целиком |
|
|
Анекдот
|
- Дочь, мне сказали, что ты куришь!
- Та-а-ак, ну и с какой из бабок я не поздоровалась? |
|
показать все
|
|