"Carr, Terry - Dance Of The Changer And The Three" - читать интересную книгу автора (Carr Terry)

him after he had gone under the lapping waters of the ocean.
The dance he went 'through to give this description was
intricate and even imaginative, because Minnearo had spent
most of that third life cycle working it out in his mind. It
used motion and color and sound and another sense some-
thing like smell, all to communicate descriptions of falling,
impact with the water, and then the quick dissolution and
blending in the currents of the ocean, the dimming and loss
of awareness, and finally the awakening, the completion of
'the change. Minnearo had a rather romantic turn of mind,
so he imagined himself recoalescing around the life-mote of
one of Loarr's greatest heroes, Krollim, and forming on
Krollim's old pattern. And he even ended the dance with
suggestions of glory and imitations by others, which was
definitely presumptuous. But the friend for whom the dance
was given did nod approvingly at several points.
"If it turns out to be half what you anticipate," said this
friend, Pur, "then I envy you. But you never know."
"I guess not," Minnearo said, rather morosely. And he
hesitated before leaving, for Pur was what I suppose I'd better
call female, and Minnearo had rather hoped that she would
join him in the ocean jump. But if she thought of it she gave
no sign, merely gazing at Minnearo calmly, waiting for him
to go; so finally he did.
And at the appropriate time, with his friend Fless watching
him from the edge of the cliff, Minnearo did his final wave-
dance as Minnearorather excited and ill-coordinated, but
that was understandable in the circumstancesand then per-
formed his approach to the edge, leaped and tumbled down-
ward through the air, making fully two dozen turns this way
and that before he hit the water.
Fless hurried back and described the suicide to Asterra and
Pur, who laughed and applauded in most of the right places,
so on the whole it was a success. Then the three of them sat
down and began plotting Minnearo's revenge.
All right, I know a lot of this doesn't make sense. Maybe
that's because I'm trying to tell you about the Loarra in
human terms, which is a mistake with creatures as alien as
they are. Actually, the Loarra are almost wholly 'an energy
life-form, their consciousness coalescing in each life cycle
around a spatial center which they call a "life-mote," so that,
if you could see the patterns of energy they form (as I have,
using a sense filter our expedition developed for that pur-
pose), they'd look rather like a spiral nebula sometimes, or
other times like iron filings gathering around a magnet, or
maybe like a half-melted snowflake. (That's probably what
Minnearo looked like on that day, because it's the suicides
and the aged who look like that.) Their forms keep shifting,
of course, but each individual usually keeps close to one
pattern.