标题: 《The integral trees》作者： - Larry Niven 【EPUB】 [打印本页] 作者: zaq 时间: 2013-12-30 08:30 标题: 《The integral trees》作者： - Larry Niven 【EPUB】 Integral Trees - Known Space Larry Niven Produced by calibre 0.6.40 Integral Trees - Known Space - 2 –The Integral Trees Larry Niven This book is dedicated to Robert Forward for the stories hes sparked in me for his help inworking out the parameters of the Smoke Ring and for his big roomy mind. Prologue Discipline IT WAS TAKING TOO LONG MUCH LONGER THAN HE HAD EXPECTED. Sharis Davis Kendy had not been an impatient man. After the change he had thought himselfimmune to impatience. But it was taking too long What were they doing in there His senses were not limited. Shariss telescopic array was powerful he could sense the fullelectromagnetic spectrum from microwave up to X-ray. But the Smoke Ring balked his view. Itwas a storm of wind dust clouds of water vapor huge rippling drops of dirty water or thinmud masses of free-floating rock dots and motes and clumps of green green surfaces on thedrops and the rocks green tinges of algae in the clouds trees shaped like integration signsoriented radially to the neutron star and tufted with green at both ends whale-sized creatureswith vast mouths to skim the green-tinged clouds . Life was everywhere in the Smoke Ring. Claire Dalton had called it a Christmas wreath. Clairehad been a very old woman before the State revived her as a corpsicle. The others had neverseen a Christmas wreath nor had Kendy. What they had seen half a thousand years ago was aperfect smoke ring several tens of thousands of kilometers across with a tiny hot pinpoint inits center. Their reports had been enthusiastic. Life was DNA-based the air was not only breathable buttasted fine Discpline presently occupied the point of gravitational neutrality behind Goldblatts Worldthe L2 point. This close the sky split equally into star-sprinkled black- and green-tinged cloudscape. Directly below a vast distorted whirlpool of storm hid the residue of a gas giant planet a rocky nugget two and a half times the mass of Earth. Sharis would not enter that inner region. The maelstrom of forces could damage his ship. Hecouldnt guess how long the seeder rmship must survive to accomplish his mission. He hadwaited more than half a thousand years already. The L2 point was still within the gas torus ofwhich the Smoke Ring was only the densest part. Discpline was subject to slow erosive forces.He couldnt last forever in this place. At least the crew were not extinct. That would have hurt him terribly. He had done his duty. Their ancestors had been mutineers a potential threat to the Stateitself. To reeducate their descendants was his goal but if the Smoke Ring had killed