Tuhor: переводы

→'Sure, I am thrifty, but I want some quality. And the food is better here.' You heard it. Even the gods acknowledge that Ship can cook!

→I just looked at the god. I have of course met quite a few big Ais in my career. I have even seen the God-Emperor on Tiphareth from afar when I visited during the Founding Festival. And there were Enremdean symbionts at the spaceport. But the feeling of sitting right across the small polymex table from one of the Imperial Gods was definitely unsettling. What do you do? Fall down and worship the man in the animated pyjamas? Ask for an authograph or a solar system? Just ask questions like a robot?

→It all looked like a fairly basic colony deal. Our company was approached by a local interfacer who wanted us to relocate two magnum cargo-cylinders to some planet on the outskirts of the Federation as a part of a colonisation project. The cylinders were apparently full of colonists and their equipment, cryonically frozen. I usually dislike taking one-way cargo, but the interfacer had some major economics behind it and the pay was very good - long-term terraforming bonds, Ferjik accesses and some clever mutual fund our shark AI thought was brilliant. Just the kind of safe big pay we like, unlikely to vanish like my father's savings did during the Version War. So we took the cylinders and started accelerating away from Enremdea.

→Any relativist captain worth his ship should have at least one unbelievable story, and I got mine a scant century back in the Federation. It was the time I hauled a cargo of gods.

→Do you believe me? I'm certain you don't, gods just don't do that sort of thing, do they? So you would demand proof. I can show you the cargo manifests and Enremdea paperwork for taking the colonist cargo, but that doesn't prove much. I can also tell you the name and position of the system we went to. But there is nothing there. The real punchline of the story is that the system doesn't exist and apparently has never existed. Once we got back to civilisation we tried to check it out in catalogues, and found there was no trace of it. There were no K stars in that vicinity, no systems matching the description in any of the local surveys. I'm still not certain how Orion did that trick. A theologist once suggested that it had just altered our memories of the coordinates and name, but I don't know. Maybe it just moved the ship, or the star.

→His good cheer was starting to soften me up. 'You could have hired the Casi clan, they're cheaper with their fleet of rustbuckets.'

→'Well, my real name is Orion'

→'Like what you are.'

→'I guess I owe you an explanation.'

→'To travel, of course. Do you really think it would be cost-effective to build my own ship? As the Assembly always complains, I am a thrifty god.'

→'What does a god need a spaceship for?'

→There are some strange people in the nebulas there. Droid tribes and architectures descended from Metasoft defectors and Coggie radicals. Some kinds of tweaks have learned to live in the infrared globules, and the Rikendra 43 are more insects than humans. But that is like the rest of the Federation, filled with odd people and places. The Orion Federation is an odd place, and maybe it is because of their AI.

→But there is one region of space where the saying isn't true, and that is the Orion Federation. Those nebulas still look magnificent close up - draperies of red and blue, streaks as dark as the galactic Nadir. And bright young stars everywhere, lighting up the gas and blowing it into piles, streamers or bubbles. The sky at Enremdea - on one side the Orion nebula, on the other the Cone Nebula and the Christmas Tree - is one of the most magnificent sights anywhere. Sure, you could interface a virtual and see it, but there is nothing like actually going through it at gamma ten or a hundred or as fast as you can possibly go. When you actually see the nebula move slowly, and you know you are going near lightspeed you get the real sense of the size of it.

→There is a common saying: "A nebula only looks good from the distance". And usually it is true. When you look at one through a telescope or when doing a spacewalk on a nightside they are gorgeous. But when you get closer they fade and become transparent, and when you are in the middle of one it just looks like the stars are a bit more reddish than usual. Even the Blackbody Nebula out in the Perseus Arm loses its drama when you get close to it. I should know, I have flown straight through it.