Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown.
Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.
Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route.
So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet?
You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge.
You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find.
But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them...
彼得·沃茨：加拿大著名硬科幻小說家，同時也是一位專攻海洋哺乳動物的生物學家。2000年發(fā)表科幻長篇處女作《海星》，之后完成續(xù)作并整合為"裂縫三部曲"（Rifters trilogy）。由于其過硬的科學背景，“裂縫三部曲”也成為硬科幻的代表，奠定了作者在當代科幻小說界的地位。
十余年來，彼得·沃茨曾多次入圍并獲得科幻界重要獎項：2000年，“裂縫三部曲”第一部《海星》入圍約翰·坎貝爾獎；2007年，長篇小說《盲視》入圍雨果獎、軌跡獎；2010年，《島》榮獲雨果獎最佳短中篇；2011年，《怪形》榮獲軌跡獎最佳短篇、入圍雨果獎最佳短篇。
|
