JК
Crashlander :: Нивен Ларри
Страница: 162 из 199We can't use it.»
Sharrol said, «It looks small. I don't mean the IC cavity. I can get into that. But there's not much room for transplants in that storage space.»
«Oh, no. This is advanced stuff. I had a hand in the design. One day we'll be able to use these techniques with everyone.» Carlos patted the monster. «There's nothing in here in the way of cloned organs and such. There's the Surgery program, and a reservoir of organic soup, and a googol of self-replicating machines a few hundred atoms long. If I lost a leg or an eye, they'd turn me off and rebuild it onto me. There's even … here, pay attention. You feed the organics reservoir through here, so the machine doesn't run out of material. You could even feed it Fafnir fish if you can catch them, but they're metal-deficient …»
When he had us thoroughly familiar with the beast, he helped Sharrol into the cavity, waited to be sure she was hooked up, and closed it. That made me nervous as hell. She climbed out a day later claiming that she hadn't felt a thing, wasn't hungry, didn't even have to use the bathroom.
* * *
The 'doc was massive. I had to really heave against it to get it moving, and then it wanted to move along the shore. I forced it to turn inland. The proper place to hide it was in the lamplighter nest, of course.
I was gasping like death itself, and the daylight had almost died, and I just couldn't push that mass uphill.
I left it on the beach. Maybe there was an answer. Let my hindbrain toy with it for a while.
I trudged across sand to rough coral and kept walking to the peak. We'd picked the island partly for its isolation. Two distant yellow lights, eastward, marked two islands I'd noted earlier. I ran my mag specs (the side that worked) up to 2OX and scanned the whole horizon, and found nothing but the twin lamplighter glows.
And nothing to do but wait.
I sat with my back against the lip of the dead lamplighter pit. I pictured her: she looked serious, a touch worried, under a feather crest and undyed skin: pink shading to brown, an Anglo tanned as if by Fafnir's yellow-white sun.
I said, «Sharrol.»
Like the dead she had slept, her face slack beneath the faceplate, like Sleeping Beauty. I'd taken to talking to her, wondering if some part of her heard. I'd never had the chance to ask.
«I never wondered why you loved me. Egotist, I am. But you must have looked like me when you were younger. Thirty years underwater, no sunlight. Your uncles, your father, they must have looked a lot like me. Maybe even with white hair.
Sharrol said, «It looks small. I don't mean the IC cavity. I can get into that. But there's not much room for transplants in that storage space.»
«Oh, no. This is advanced stuff. I had a hand in the design. One day we'll be able to use these techniques with everyone.» Carlos patted the monster. «There's nothing in here in the way of cloned organs and such. There's the Surgery program, and a reservoir of organic soup, and a googol of self-replicating machines a few hundred atoms long. If I lost a leg or an eye, they'd turn me off and rebuild it onto me. There's even … here, pay attention. You feed the organics reservoir through here, so the machine doesn't run out of material. You could even feed it Fafnir fish if you can catch them, but they're metal-deficient …»
When he had us thoroughly familiar with the beast, he helped Sharrol into the cavity, waited to be sure she was hooked up, and closed it. That made me nervous as hell. She climbed out a day later claiming that she hadn't felt a thing, wasn't hungry, didn't even have to use the bathroom.
* * *
The 'doc was massive. I had to really heave against it to get it moving, and then it wanted to move along the shore. I forced it to turn inland. The proper place to hide it was in the lamplighter nest, of course.
I was gasping like death itself, and the daylight had almost died, and I just couldn't push that mass uphill.
I left it on the beach. Maybe there was an answer. Let my hindbrain toy with it for a while.
I trudged across sand to rough coral and kept walking to the peak. We'd picked the island partly for its isolation. Two distant yellow lights, eastward, marked two islands I'd noted earlier. I ran my mag specs (the side that worked) up to 2OX and scanned the whole horizon, and found nothing but the twin lamplighter glows.
And nothing to do but wait.
I sat with my back against the lip of the dead lamplighter pit. I pictured her: she looked serious, a touch worried, under a feather crest and undyed skin: pink shading to brown, an Anglo tanned as if by Fafnir's yellow-white sun.
I said, «Sharrol.»
Like the dead she had slept, her face slack beneath the faceplate, like Sleeping Beauty. I'd taken to talking to her, wondering if some part of her heard. I'd never had the chance to ask.
«I never wondered why you loved me. Egotist, I am. But you must have looked like me when you were younger. Thirty years underwater, no sunlight. Your uncles, your father, they must have looked a lot like me. Maybe even with white hair.