Alan Dean Foster- Life Form

VIP免费

2024-12-24 0 0 1.21MB 315 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

LIFE FORM

Alan Dean Foster

This book is an Ace original edition, and has never been previously

published.

LIFE FORM

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Ace edition / July 1995

Cover art by Linda Messier.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part,

by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

ISBN: 0-441-00218-8

ACE®

Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

200 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016.

ACE and the “A” design are trademarks

belonging to Charter Communications, Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For Rodney Fox…

Under whose friendly guidance I have

Snatched from its lips a tooth of the White Death

Ridden the back of the Great Fish

Seen the green flash

Marveled at the hidden portraits of the Dreamtime

Been bitten in the eye by an angry green ant

Played tennis atop a mountain of iron

Toyed with a living emerald

Communed with the shadow of a thermonuclear explosion

Walked the finest beach in the world

Dived the reefs still primeval

And more importantly, shared silent wonders, quiet

moments, and good humor.

He also ain’t a bad field cook.

With many thanks and best wishes to him

And blessings upon his good wife and progeny.

Twenty-four hours to wake up, and in all that time you didn’t

even get to yawn once.

Stevens studied the monitors, his practiced gaze flicking

successively from one readout and screen to the next. Eventually

his eyes came to rest on the vids that monitored their somnolent

cargo. There was a separate pickup for each capsule, separate

readouts for each individual life-support system.

Revivication/awakening procedures had just reached the

ten-hour mark, with fourteen still to go. No yawning, no rubbing

your eyes. It was a delicate, instrument-intensive process. When

someone’s been in deep sleep for over a year you don’t just set off

an alarm clock next to their ear and expect them to pop up

inquiring if they’re late for the morning commute to work.

Actually, their work was doing the commuting for them.

There were four worlds circling the central G-type star, which

its optimistic Brazilian discoverers had enthusiastically named Xica

da Silva, or Xica, for convenience’ sake. The outermost was a gas

giant, a lonely but colorful banded sentinel the size of Neptune. It

had collected five moons, all interesting but dead, and was flanked

inside and out by a pair of asteroid belts. The two innermost

worlds were scorched and torn by clashing tectonic forces, broken

paving stones on the path outward from the sun.

Xica III… Xica da Silva… was a possible miracle.

One of many similar long-lived mechanical servants of

humankind entrusted with the Long Ride Out, the Xica probe had

reported back the presence of a breathable atmosphere, reasonable

gravity, and oceans of hydrogen dioxide. Despite the dispatching of

dozens of identical devices, these conditions had been encountered

only twice before outside the solar system. The probe subsequently

strongly suggested but could not confirm the presence on the two

main land masses of a biota of consequence.

As nothing more advanced than primitive fungi, lichens, and

segmented worms had been found on Tycho V or Burke, when the

prospects for Xica were reported, competition among qualified

scientists for places on the James Cook grew more than spirited,

with several notably sedate individuals coming to blows once the

final selections had been announced. Stevens hadn’t been involved.

Though he had a deep interest in exploration, he was no scientist.

Somebody had to drive the truck while the brains rode in back,

arguing over prospective Nobels and Sakharovs. That task fell to

him. Him and Lastwell.

He swiveled slightly in his seat to regard the captain. The two

men had worked together for some time. Each knew and respected

the other’s limits and abilities. Stevens had youth and energy,

Lastwell great practical experience and determination. Together

they comprised the entire crew of the James Cook. It was all the vast

ship required.

Most of the time it needed no crew at all, the redundant

automatics handling routine functions silently and efficiently. Only

when it had begun to slow from its long journey a month ago had

it awakened its crew. Both of them. Now that all systems had been

checked out and the ship was in Xican orbit, it was time to rouse

the vessel’s somnolent scientific compliment.

Stevens looked forward to meeting them with a mixture of

expectation and apprehension. The committee that had chosen the

fortunate few had gone to great lengths, just as they had prior to

the journeys of exploration to Tycho V and Burke, to ensure that

all members of a team would be compatible. Scientists and

researchers were chosen to crew such voyages as much for their

ability to get along with others as for their mental skills, but no

selection process was perfect, Stevens knew. He’d worked with

some who’d worn an air of superiority like dirty underwear.

He had never met nor did he know any of them. Unlike the

crew, they’d been put on board already in deepsleep, like so many

cocooned worker bees, their individual capsules shoehorned into

the waiting empty sockets like jewels into findings. The transparent

cylinders showed him what they looked like, but not what they

were.

That would be learned soon enough, he knew.

He remembered the rush of final preparations, the pulling

back of the support vessels. Then he and Lastwell had cut on the

fusion engines and, ever so slowly, the James Cook had begun to

move. Away from Earth. Away from Home. Checks and rechecks

and final checks, and then it was time for the Long Beddy-bye for

the pair of them as well.

Now he’d been awake for a month, and looked forward avidly

to having someone to talk to besides Lastwell. No doubt the

captain felt the same way about his mate.

He glanced again at the nine sets of life-support monitors.

Every readout was equable and within designated parameters. No

one was sent into deep space, no matter how brilliant, if they

weren’t healthy. The James Cook had facilities, but it was no

hospital. Its cargo had to be able to breathe efficiently on its own.

Lastwell muttered at him, preceding and concluding the

request with a ripe invective. The captain could be inventive as

well, but preferred to reserve his best efforts for special occasions.

The obscenity did not trouble Stevens. It was merely Lastwell’s

manner of speech, a form of specific punctuation not unlike the

singsong of Mandarin or the click-stops of the Xhosa. He complied

without thinking as he turned his attention to the vid screens.

The six men and three women represented an extraordinary

range of talent and abilities. Intellectually, Stevens knew the least of

them could spin him dizzy. But he doubted there was one among

them who, no matter how much time they were given, could fix a

broken food service unit. In his own skills, however plebeian others

might consider them, he was supremely confident. With eleven

lives hanging in the balance on the work he was expected to

perform, this was a good thing.

Several of them had been on pioneering expeditions to Tycho

V or Burke. Two had been to both and were therefore, to a certain

extent, possessors of that peculiar attribute known as fame. Stevens

and Lastwell had taken the James Cook twice to Burke, but not in

company with any of those currently in their care. Like Stevens, the

youngest among them was near thirty. At fifty-two, Cedric

Carnavon was the eldest.

Stevens had had plenty of time to study their records. His

passengers represented a wide range of specialties and interests. He

hoped they could be relied upon not to do the stupid thing the first

time. From experience he knew that most scientists had a

worrisome habit of becoming dangerously preoccupied with their

work, even to the extent of ignoring personal safety. All the honors

and degrees in the world couldn’t help someone trapped in a

crevice, or stranded on low power in an arctic environment.

“Stop staring at number Seven, ya mucky pervert!”

“I wasn’t staring at Seven any more than any of the others,”

Stevens shot back. He swiveled fully to face Lastwell, who grinned

back at him. Seated in the command chair, the older man affected

the aura of a minor potentate. His skin was pale, the face chiseled

underneath but slightly puffy on top, his blond hair graying and

thinning. A man of action rather than contemplation, he abhorred

delays or hesitation of any kind. Even as he was accusing his

assistant he was carefully monitoring a battery of readouts,

wondering just how accurate the old probe’s report had been. Too

many light-years to travel only to verify inconstant data.

“I said I wasn’t staring.” Stevens was insistent.

Still smiling, Lastwell replied without looking up. “Don’t try

to fob me, Mate. This is Frank you’re talkin’ to. I’ve seen you take a

stroll through the sleep room to have a private peek or two.”

“Of course I’ve looked in on them,” Stevens protested. “So

have you. It’s part of the job.”

“Fob job.” Lastwell chuckled, maintaining his ever so slight

but inescapable air of superiority. Stevens was used to it, and

ignored it.

“I’ve run the standard in-chamber checks every day for the

past twenty-eight, as per regs. Just like on the two cycles to Burke.”

“And lingered longest at the ladies’ capsules, unlike on the two

cycles to Burke.”

“You haven’t done anything of the sort, I suppose.”

The captain frowned momentarily as he leaned forward to

squint at a readout. He nudged a small switch, grunted at the result,

and settled back in his seat with an air of contentment.

“Oh, I’ve taken a glance or two. Not near as long as you,

though. I’m a married man.”

“The homefires burn dimly from here, Frank.”

Lastwell turned to his friend and assistant. “Maybe so, but

married I still am. About all I can do is look. Legitimately.”

“You’ve seen the two in Seven and Eight. Would you do

otherwise if you had the chance?”

The older man blinked at his own set of capsule monitors.

When he replied, there was a wistfulness in his voice that belied his

usual explosive good humor. “According to their individual stats,

there isn’t a one of them that doesn’t muster twice my pan power.

That would make any kind of relationship awkward, though neither

of them could handle a ship. And I think that’s about enough of

this business, Mate. Let’s let it go, right?”

Stevens turned back to his instruments, but Lastwell wasn’t

through.

“And you remember that we’re out here to do a job. The

Council pays us more than we’re worth to spend most of our time

sleepin’. Not a bad life, no. So don’t you go screwin’ things up, in

every sense of the word.”

It was Stevens’s turn to smile. “Have I ever given you any

problems, Frank?”

“No, you crazy wanker. Never. But we’ve never before

convoyed a pair of heavy thinkers that looked like Seven and Eight,

either.”

The mate considered the pallid closeups supplied by the

monitors. “They all look pretty washed out.”

“Who wouldn’t,” Lastwell muttered, “after not takin’ a breath

or sucking on a glass of water for more than ten months?

Deepsleep’s amazin’, but nobody ever said it was fun.” He

stretched emphatically. “Damn glad to be out of it myself. They’ll

be wanting water first. That’s what they always want.”

“At least they’re not all novices,” Stevens murmured. “We

won’t have to wet-nurse each of them. Carnavon and Simna have

outspaced you and me.”

“Too bloody right. It’s the other seven we’ll have to keep an

eye on.” His smile returned. “All seven of ‘em, and not just the

two.”

“They’re all pros, or they wouldn’t have been selected to make

this trip. You and I didn’t have to compete to be chosen. Our

names just came up.”

“Not by accident, though,” Lastwell insisted. “Not by no

bloody accident. I suppose we ought to be flattered, Kauri, old

boy.”

“I don’t feel flattered. Just tired.”

“Better suck it in. It’s only going to get busier when that lot

wakes up.” The captain absently thumbed another control. “Be a

helluva lot simpler if all this exploring could be done by

automatics. They do what you tell them to, and they don’t argue or

talk back. Can even give you some decent conversation if they’re

properly programmed.” He aimed his voice at a pickup. “Ain’t that

right, ship?”

“Too bloody right, Captain Lastwell,” the synthesized voice

replied tersely.

“But you can’t talk to automatics at length,” Stevens pointed

out. “You can’t have an extended conversation.”

“How many people can you do that with, and be comfortable

the whole time?” Lastwell loved a good argument almost as much

as he did the James Cook. “Give me automatics any day. Sound

mechanicals, open space, a fixed destination.” He stared out the

foreport at the untouched, unexplored world drifting beneath them,

an entirely different kind of expression on his face.

Then he blinked and glared at Stevens. “Don’t play mind

games with me, Kauri. Just tend to your work. If you haven’t got

anything better to occupy yourself with, I’m sure we can scrounge

something up for you.”

Stevens said nothing. His attention returned to the monitors

that showed capsules Seven and Eight. Inside, he was churning.

Seven and Eight presented a situation he’d never had to deal with

on either of his two previous outspace journeys. Not only were the

botanist and biologist asleep in the two capsules unmarried, they

were his age and unfairly attractive.

The corner of his mouth twitched. He’d dealt with more

serious problems. He would manage to deal with this one.

But it would have been a lie to say he was focused entirely on

the business at hand.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

LIFEFORM AlanDeanFoster ThisbookisanAceoriginaledition,andhasneverbeenpreviouslypublished. LIFEFORM AnAceBook/publishedbyarrangementwiththeauthor PRINTINGHISTORYAceedition/July1995 Allrightsreserved.Copyright©1995byAlanDeanFoster.CoverartbyLindaMessier.Thisbookmaynotbereproducedinwholeorinpar...

展开>> 收起<<

Alan Dean Foster- Life Form.pdf

共315页,预览63页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Alan Dean Foster- Life Form

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: