"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 1 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

Not that they had cities; that seemed clear. This was a kind of life that lent new meaning to the much-misused term alien. Even if Trannon Kose looked like a collection of misshapen radishes stuck together by fuzzy pipe cleaners and the Durquist like a fat-bellied starfish with hot lips, they were organic, made up of carbon-based molecules, and while they had evolved differently than his own kind, they had evolved according to the rules. Hundreds of races had come out of primordial slime, most forming carbon-based life, a few silicon-based, but otherwise so much within the rules that they defined "life as we know it and understand it."
Not here. This was life as nobody knew or understood it.
He isolated more, locked, tried to read an individual as much as possible. The resulting stream made his head hurt and his mind dizzy. He'd done this with races so strangely different that he couldn't imagine what the hell they considered a coherent thought, but this was beyond all of them. This wasn't even garbage!
He instantly realized the basic problem here, which was the curse of all codes and code-breakers. Because "life as we know it" had certain common origins, even if it did come out looking and behaving so differently, there were always common traits. Most creatures slept in some fashion, or had some concept of rest. Most ate in some kind of fashion recognizable as such, even if what they ate and how often disgusted the onlooker. There was always some relationship of those most ancient elements: earth, air, fire, water. If nothing else, they were aware of the damned weather.
There was always, eventually, something to grab on to, something to build on.
But what the hell did anybody aboard Widowmaker have in common, even to the most microscopic degree, with the denizens of the Hot Plant?
There seemed to be no up, no down, no concept of direction that came across- in any holographic sense. Instead of a null band, they appeared to have two telepathic bands he could catch, one of which was almost constantly active and probably served as some substitute for sight; the other was the internal thought patterns he was trying to grab.
They floated, they darted, suspended in an enormous band well below the surface activity, but balanced so that they were unaware of gravity's heavy pull. If they had artifacts, there was nothing to suggest it in the patterns, although he couldn't imagine what sort of artifacts you could have without anything solid, without resources of any sort save the energy in which you lived.
He might even nave accepted the idea of some single mass mind evolving in that crap, but clearly this was an enormous mass of individuals; if he'd had anything to hold on to, he could have told them apart.
Another commonalty was sensory input. Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch -- that kind of thing. Some of the methods evolution came up with were pretty weird there, too, but any thinking being had sense organs of some kind. Not here. That secondary telepathic band seemed to provide the substitute for input, but the information it relayed was of necessity processed into concepts that had no human equivalents.
Aye, that was the rub. He was getting their holographic patterns -- he just had never had their frame of reference and was unequipped to even imagine it. The pictures meant something to them, but nothing to him.
He realized he was traveling well-trod ground here, but he already felt the sting of defeat. What in God's name could he come up with that the best and brightest brains of the Exchange and all those races and all those computers and all the rest could not?
And yet it was frustrating as hell, for the patterns he was getting were both definite and highly complex; there was no question that they were not merely thoughts but very involved ones. It was impossible to explain, but just "listening" to the patterns and sensing how they were grouped and directed, any telepath knew that whatever was there definitely did think, and on a plane well above the common animal or plant. The interaction of these patterns also suggested not merely individuals but some sort of coherent if not comprehensible social organization.
But how the bloody hell did you talk to something that had not one single word or picture in common with you?
He isolated what he thought was a single individual, although he couldn't be certain at this range, tracked it for a bit, then took a deep breath and opened up his mind to it, forming a wide-open telepathic link.
Suddenly he was inside the other mind, in a blazing, confusing whirl, where nothing made sense and everything looked like fractured nightmare images, just swirls of color and weird shapes and lines, and bizarre, insane imagery.
At the same time, the creature was also in his mind, suddenly alone, its secondary band sending back effectively no information, all cold and dark and so terribly alone.
He felt it die; suddenly, like a candle being snuffed out, with only some last thought that had to be a cry of terror or horror, and he snapped back into himself, sweating and trembling.
He'd finally found some commonalty of thought, but it wasn't very useful. The creature, whose whole universe was defined by the twin telepathic bands, had suddenly found that universe no longer defined. Whatever passed for a brain in it instantly interpreted this condition and acted accordingly.
Everything it knew or understood or trusted told it that it was dead, and so it died.
< You better take a break. Jimmy, > Grysta cautioned, breaking the silence. < Your pulse rate alone is near the danger level. >
A flick of the right hand and the energy blister vanished and the link was turned off, but he just lay there awhile. He'd been warned, but he still found it nearly impossible to believe. It went against everything in his own frame of reference.
"I killed it, Grysta," he muttered, disbelievingly.
< So? You've killed before. >
"In self-defense, yes, but -- not just by trying to say hello."
< You sure about that? I mean, you sure they're there at all? I mean really sure ? >
He thought about that. Could he, in fact, be getting a reading from somewhere else? Did it only seem to come from that inferno? No instruments could really do more than measure the strength of the telepathic band; the only reason for anyone believing that there were living, thinking things on that burning world was the strength of the band and the gut feeling of the telepaths who had plumbed it.
Certainly his own interface with the com link had indicated that what he was getting was from the Hot Plant; certainly, too, the prior expeditions here would have checked to see if there were some kind of anomaly that was misdirecting them.
But instruments were, as always, only good at measuring what they were told to measure or what they were designed to measure.
The fact was, his heart said that they were there, but his mind still rebelled, and Grysta's suggestion had fed that intellectual sense of disbelief. He decided that he needed a meeting with the team. Maybe that Metal Head would be useful after all.
Tris Lankur was interested yet not very excited by the idea of some sort of telepathic illusion.
"If not from the Hot Plant, then where?" he asked the others. "McCray, you're the only telepath we have. None of us can really experience what you do with the kind of lifelong training you've had. If you, along with all the ones before you, feel that it's coming from there, and the mind recordings bear out that conviction, who are we to question it? And why do you?"
"It was Grysta who planted the idea in my head," he "told them, seeing the slight discomfort that went through the others-all but Lankur, he noted cynically -- at being reminded of the extra creature aboard. "But she only voiced what I couldn't place. The wrongness of it, somehow. Life there simply defies logic. I -- all the telepaths -- can only go on experience, you know. The Talent says yes, but I've seen many a magician who could fool everyone here with some sleight of hand, and I've seen ghost solar systems show up on instruments, and caught tight-beam signals that seemed to come from nearby ships or worlds that were somehow whipped and curled across many light-years by freaks of nature. They say what goes in black holes might eventually spurt out somewhere else, but we've never found a white hole, so if that's true, where does the crap go when it weighs more than the universe can support?"
"Are you seriously suggesting that we might be getting a reading from an alternate universe?" the Durquist asked, genuinely fascinated.
"In a way it would make a kind of lopsided sense," Trannon Kose put in. "This is a most unusual, probably unique, solar system. The kind of forces that come into play here are mysterious and beyond our current understanding. If there were any kind of door into such an alternate universe, it would be in a system like this, under conditions like these."
"Indeed, and an alternate universe would not necessarily have anything in common with ours, not even the same natural laws," the Durquist noted. "It would certainly account for the total lack of commonalty between our minds. Why, this raises the stakes considerably if true! Contact across parallel universes -- it's never been done! It's never been dreamt of!"
"Hold on!" Tris Lankur told him. "Calm down, all of you. The next thing you'll be suggesting is that it's some kind of microscopic civilization on a tiny, dense moon of the Hot Plant."
"Unlikely," responded the Durquist, taking the comment seriously. "Such an object would move or at least wobble even if geostationary. It wouldn't be as predictable. Whatever we're getting at least matches the rotation of the Hot Plant. However, an alternate solar system in which the Hot Plant wasn't hot, or perhaps where such things are normal -- that would explain it, since that near-singularity out there would almost certainly pop through to their universe -- or perhaps is popping through to ours. Now that's a thought."
Jimmy McCray sighed. "Then it's irrelevant. We're arguing angels on the heads of pins here. I was thinking, or rather hoping, that the conditions here were simply acting as a distorter, that we were missing the real origin. But whether or not we're looking into another universe, the problem's the same. How to tell somebody we're here, don't die on us, when we've got absolutely nothing in common except a shared telepathic band. Forget it. I should have realized this was a dead end before I called a meet."
Tris Lankur thought a moment. "No, at least it's gotten us all in on this. You know, I've reviewed all the records, over and over, and it seems like nobody before us has tried alternate approaches."
"We've beamed on every type of transmitter we have, to no avail," the Durquist reminded him. "What wasn't tried?"
Lankur looked over at Modra, who was very quiet through all this and seemed to be mostly avoiding looking at him. "Empathic bands, perhaps?"
She looked up and frowned, almost as if she'd been a million light-years away and suddenly got wrenched back. "What?"
"They had empathic scans, to ensure that the telepaths weren't all crazy," the Durquist noted.
"Yes, maybe. But they only used them for wide scan, to establish a second level of proof that living beings were actually there. They never tried active empathy in the same way they tried telepathy."
"What are you all talking about?" Modra asked them.
"I think he wants you to go into the amplifier," Jimmy told her. "At least, even if you zero in on one of them, you won't just murder it."
Suddenly the air around them erupted with impossibly loud alarm bells. Almost instantly all of them were frozen where they stood or sat, surrounded in a protective green energy blister deployed by the ship's computer. There was a tremendous crash, as if something huge had struck the ship, and the lights and most of the power went, abruptly, and eerily, silencing the cacophony of alarms in mid-clang and mid-screech, producing a sudden, expectant silence that was the worst of all.
Then it hit.
They were suddenly falling, tumbling in the total darkness, stomachs turning inside out, each on a bizarre looping and whirling ride in the nothingness.