Space. Stephen Baxter
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Название: Space

Автор: Stephen Baxter

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Научная фантастика

Серия:

isbn: 9780007499793

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ a smooth surface, overlaid by what felt like cables the width of his thumb, but welded somehow to the wall. The cables were a little hard to grip, but he clamped his fingers around them.

      Anchored, he felt a lot more comfortable.

      The wall itself was soft, neither warm nor cold, smooth beyond the discrimination of his touch. It curved tightly around him. Perhaps he was in some kind of inflated bubble; it could be no more than a few metres across. And it wasn’t inflated to maximum tension. When he pushed at the wall it rippled in great languid waves, pulses of golden light that briefly occluded the stars.

      He picked at the membrane with one fingernail. It felt like some kind of plastic. He had no reason to believe it was anything more advanced; the Gaijin had not shown themselves to be technological super-beings. He could have easily taken a scraping of this stuff, analysed it with a small portable lab. Except he didn’t have a portable lab.

      Something bumped against his leg. ‘Shit,’ he said. He whirled, scrabbling at the embedded ropes, until he was backed up against the wall.

      It was the helmet from his Shuttle EMU.

      He picked it up and turned it over in his gloved hands. The helmet had a snap-on metal ring, to fit it to the rest of the suit – or rather, it used to. The attachment had been cut, as if by a laser.

      The Gaijin – or their robot drones, here on the edge of the Alpha system – had found him in a shell of gases: air that roughly matched what they must have known, from some equivalent of spectrograph studies, of the composition of Earth’s atmosphere. So they had provided more of the gases in this containment, and broken open his suit – and then, presumably, hoped for the best.

      He took off his gloves. He found he was still wearing his lightweight comms headset. He pulled it off and tucked it inside the helmet. There was no sign of his manoeuvring unit.

      … And now a kind of after-shock cut in. He rested against the slowly rippling wall, lit up by gold-filtered Centauri light, four light years from home. The robots had been smart, he realized with a shiver. After all the robots, if not the Gaijin themselves, shared nothing like human anatomy. What if they’d decided to see if his whole head was detachable? He felt very old, fragile, and unexpectedly lonely – as he hadn’t during the long months of his Perry flight to the Saddle Point.

      What now?

      First things first. You need a bio break, Malenfant.

      He forced himself to take a leak into the condom he still wore. He felt the warm piss gather in the sac inside his suit. Piss that had been magically transported across four light years. He probably ought to bottle it; if he ever got back home he could probably sell it, a memento of man’s first journey to the stars.

      There was movement, a wash of light beyond the bubble wall. Something immense, bright, cruising by silently.

      He swivelled, still pinching hold of the embedded ropes, until he faced outwards. He pressed his face against the bubble wall, much as he used to as a kid, staring out of his bedroom window, hoping for snow.

      The moving light was a flower-ship.

      

      The Gaijin craft sailed across the darkness, heading for the warm glow at the heart of the Centauri system. The cables and filaments that shaped the maw of its electromagnetic scoops were half-furled, and they waved with slow grace as the ship slowly swivelled on its long axis, perhaps intent on some complex course correction. Dodecahedral shapes swarmed over its flanks, reduced by distance to toy-like specks, fast-moving, intent, purposeful. They almost looked as if they were rebuilding the ship as it travelled – as perhaps they were; Malenfant imagined a flexible geometry, a ship that could adjust its form to the competing needs of the cold stillness here at the rim of this binary system, and the crowded warmth at its heart.

      But still, despite its strangeness, he felt a tug at his heart as the flower-ship receded. Don’t leave me here, drifting in space.

      But he wasn’t adrift, he saw now. There were ropes embedded in the outer surface of his shell, ropes which gathered in a loosely plaited tether, as if this bubble of air had been trapped by spider-web. The tether, loosely coiled, led across space – not to the flower-ship – but to something hidden by the curve of the bubble.

      He pushed himself across the interior of the bubble to look out the other side.

      In the dim light of the distant Alpha suns, he made out only an outline: a rough ball that must have been kilometres across, the glimmer of what looked like frost from crater dimples and low mountains.

      From one spacesuit pocket he dug out a fold-up softscreen, unpacked it and plastered it against the wall of the bubble. This ’screen had been designed as a low-light and telescopic viewer. Soon its enhancement routines were cutting in, and it became a window through which he peered, angling his head to change his view.

      The object seemed to be a ball of ice. It might have been an asteroid, but he was a long way from those double suns. This was more likely the Alpha equivalent of a Kuiper object, an ice moon – or maybe he was even in this system’s Oort cloud, and this was the head of some long-period comet.

      And now he made out movement on that icy surface: continual, complex, almost rippling. He tapped at the softscreen, instructing it to magnify and enhance some more.

      He saw drone robots, swarming everywhere, their complex limbs working like cockroach legs. The drones moved back and forth in files and streams, endless traffic. Here and there in the flow there were islands of stillness, nodes where the swirl gathered in knots and eddies. And in a few places he saw the gleam of silvery blankets, perhaps like the nano-blankets Frank Paulis’s probe had found on that belt asteroid back home. Maybe they were making more flower-ships. Or perhaps these were von Neumann machines, he thought, replicators engaged primarily on making more copies of themselves, and they would continue until every gram of this remote ball of ice and rock had been converted into purposeful machinery.

      But everywhere he looked, as he scanned his ’screen, he could see endless, purposeful movement – perhaps millions of drones, the toiling community making up a glinting, robotic sea. His overwhelming impression was of cooperation, of blind, unquestioning, smoothly efficient obedience to a higher communal goal. These robots had more in common with hive insects, he thought, ants or termites, than with humans.

      … But perhaps I should have expected this, he thought. Humans were competitive. But there was no reason to suppose that everybody else had to be that way. Maybe a competitive technological community could only reach a certain point before it became unstable and destroyed itself. Arms races could only take you so far. Perhaps only the cooperative could survive. In which case, he thought, what we are going to find as we move further out is, inevitably, more of this. Termite colonies. And, perhaps, nobody like us.

      Damn, he thought. I might be the only true individual in this whole star system. What a bleak and terrifying notion.

      But if the robots were replicators they weren’t very good ones.

      They all seemed to be based on the design of the type he had first met, with that chunky dodecahedral body, limbs sprouting in a variety of configurations, apparently specialized. But otherwise these toiling drones appeared somewhat diverse. The differences weren’t great: a few extra limbs here, a touch of asymmetry there, each dodecahedron slightly diverging from the geometric ideal – but they were there.

      Perhaps the authentic von Neumann vision – of identical replicators СКАЧАТЬ