（外文电子版资料）Gregory Benford - A Hunger for the Infinite.pdf

A Hunger for the Infinite (v1.1) Gregory Benford, 1999 DEATH CAME IN ON SIXTEEN LEGS. If it is possible to look composed while something angular and ominous is hauling you up out of your hiding place, a thing barbed and hard and with a gun-leg jammed snug against your throat -- then Ahmihi was composed. He had been the Exec of the Noachian Sembly for decades and knew this corner of Chandelier Rook the way his tongue knew his mouth. Or more aptly, for the Chandelier was great and vast, the way winds know a world. But he did not know this thing of sleek, somber metal that towered over him. He felt himself lifted, wrenched. A burnt-yellow pain burst in his sensorium, the merged body/electronic feeling-sphere that enveloped him. Behind this colored agony came a ringing message, not spoken so much as implanted into his floating sense of the world around him: I wish to talk-to convey linear meaning. Yeasay, and you be --? He tried to make it nonchalant and failed, voice guttering out in a dry gasp. I am an anthology intelligence. I collapse my holographic speech to your serial inputs. Damn nice of you. The gun-leg spun him around lazily like a dangling ornament, and he saw three of his people lying dead on the decking below. He had to look away from them, to once-glorious beauties that were now a battered panorama. This section of the Citadel favored turrets, galleries, gilded columns, iron wrought into lattices of byzantine stillness. It was over a millennium old, grown by biotech foundries, unplanned beauty by mistake. The battle -- now quite over, he saw -- had not been kind. Elliptical scabs of orange rust told of his people, fried into sheets and splashed over walls. White waste of disemboweled bodies clogged corners like false snow. An image-amp wall played endlessly, trying to entertain the dead. Rough-welded steel showed anci