Аннотация
Michael Swanwick
Slow Life
Different evolutionary backgrounds lead to _very_ different perspectives.
"It was the Second Age of Space. Gagarin, Shepard, Glenn, and Armstrong were all dead. It was _our_ turn to make history now."
-- _The Memoirs of Lizzie O'Brien_
The raindrop began forming ninety kilometers above the surface of Titan. It started with an infinitesimal speck of tholin, adrift in the cold nitrogen atmosphere. Dianoacetylene condensed on the seed nucleus, molecule by molecule, until it was one shard of ice in a cloud of billions.
Now the journey could begin.
It took almost a year for the shard of ice in question to precipitate downward twenty-five kilometers, where the temperature dropped low enough that ethane began to condense on it. But when it did, growth was rapid.
Down it drifted.
At forty kilometers, it was for a time caught up in an ethane cloud. There it continued to grow. Occasionally it collided with anothe...
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