Resurgence полностью

“From what?” Hans Rebka was staring all around him. “I’m usually the pessimist of the group, but I don’t see anything to frighten us. No floods, no earthquakes, no volcanoes, no ravenous beasts looking to chomp on our rear ends.”

“That’s the whole point, Hans. No ravenous beasts—no beasts of any kind. While you were exploring, I dug in the wet soil and looked on and in the plants. I found plenty of animal life. It’s everywhere. Small and big, everything from half-meter crawlers down to sizes I can only pick up using my suit magnifiers. But it’s all like those.” She pointed to the heap of shrunken corpses at the other side of the cone-house clearing. “Dead. I don’t think there is a living animal anywhere on the surface of Marglot.”

Torran Veck shrugged. “So what? I’ve never been to Fredholm, but I understand that it’s the same way. It’s a world with vegetable life and fungi, and a bunch of microorganisms that break down dead materials. But it supports a stable biosphere.”

“It does. Everything is in balance on Fredholm because it evolved that way, over billions of years. The situation here is totally different. This planet had a balanced ecosphere—plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms all doing their bit. Then every animal suddenly died. Marglot is unstable from an ecological point of view. I don’t know how long it will take, but the vegetation will start to die, too—plants all rely on some animal forms. Oxygen content will start to go down as photosynthesis stops. I don’t know what the end point of the change will be, but long before the planet gets to that stage we’d better be gone. Nothing like humans will be able to live here. Think of it this way, Hans. We seem to be the only living animals on Marglot. It’s rarely good to be an anomaly. We need to find a way to escape, and we need to do it fast.”

“I don’t think you should be so worried, Darya.” But Hans Rebka went off to sit by himself with his back against the central trunk.

No one else was eager to continue the discussion. After a few minutes, Ben moved from a sitting position to lie flat on his back. He was actually less comfortable than in the walking car, but he had no desire to go back there. No matter how gloomy the conversation, here he at least was part of it. He was free to offer his opinions.

High up near the top of the tree-cone, the daylight slowly faded. A new sound began, of a gusting wind. The atmospheric circulation patterns on Marglot must follow the moving day-night boundary, even at the Hot Pole. Soon the pummeling of torrential rain began on the sturdy outside leaves.

Night on Marglot. A planet which, according to Darya Lang, was steadily but surely dying. Ben closed his eyes.

In your dreams you encountered situations like this, hopeless corners with no way out. Except that in your dreams, there always was an answer; and you were always the one who found it.

In your dreams. Ben opened his eyes. The interior of the cone-house was dark. He could not hear the others breathing above the sound of the rain.

This was not a dream. This was reality.

If there was a heaven for embodied computers, which E.C. Tally most seriously doubted, then he was in it.

He sat at the center of a circle of a hundred and more beetlebacks, just as he had sat for the past three days. The silver beetlebacks neither moved nor slept; instead, they talked continuously. A complex syncopation of chatter of radio signals surrounded E.C.

So much for the Orion Arm theory of organic beings, that some sleep was essential for all forms of animal life! E.C. had delegated the rest functions of his own body to a tiny part of his brain. With all the rest of his intelligence, he listened, analyzed, and spoke.

This was going to be no easy task, as was the case with Builder constructs. All you needed with them was to keep talking for a while, and they would recall or invent the appropriate human speech patterns. The beetlebacks presented a very different problem. Tally was storing away every syllable of radio utterance within his capacious memory, and it was clear that this was not a monologue or dialogue. The beetleback data streams, all one hundred and thirty-seven of them, had to be considered simultaneously. They were aware of his presence, and of what he said. He knew this, because after every one of his own speeches or questions, the beetleback radio talk clamored more furiously than ever before returning to a calmer level. They were working as hard as he was, seeking some common ground of communication. He could not vouch for their analytic powers, separately or in combination, but his own search for patterns and correlations in the hundred-plus parallel data streams suggested an effort that might take days or weeks to complete, even with his prodigious computational powers.