"Thomas M. Disch - The Genocides" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

Buddy withdrew a plug from his tree and inserted a metal tube where the
plug had been. Below the makeshift spigot he hung one of the buckets. Pulling
the plugs was hard work, for they had been in place a week and had stuck fast.
The sap, drying about the plug, acted as a glue. This work seemed always to
last just long enough for the soreness--of his fingers, his wrists, his arms,
his back--to reassert itself, but never to abate.
Before the terrible work of carrying the buckets began, Buddy stopped
and stared at the sap trickling through the pipe and oozing, like lime-green
honey, into the bucket. It was coming out slowly today. By the end of the
summer this tree would be dying and ready to be cut down.
Seen up close, it didn't seem much like a tree at all. Its skin was
smooth, like the stem of a flower. A proper tree this size would have split
through its skin under the pressure of its own growth, and its trunk would be
rough with bark. Farther back in the forest, you could find trees, big ones,
which had reached the limit of their growth and begun at last to form
something like bark. At least their trunks, though green, weren't moist to the
touch like this one. Those trees--or Plants, as Anderson called them--were six
hundred feet tall, and their biggest leaves were the size of billboards. Here
on the edge of the cornfield the growth was more recent--not more than two
years--and the highest stood only a hundred and fifty feet tall. Even so, here
as deeper in the forest, the sun came through the foliage at noonday as pale
as moonlight on a clouded night.
"Get the lead out!" Anderson called. He was already out in the field
with his full buckets of sap, and the sap was brimming over Buddy's buckets
too, _Why is there never time to think?_ Buddy envied Neil's mulish capacity
just to _do_ things, to spin the wheel of his cage without wondering overmuch
how it worked.
"Right away!" Neil yelled from a distance.
"Right away!" Buddy echoed, thankful his half-brother too had been
caught up in his own thoughts, whatever they could be.
Of the three men working in the field, Neil surely had the best body.
Except for a receding chin that gave a false impression of weakness, he was
strong and well proportioned. He was a good six inches taller than his father
or Buddy, both short men. His shoulders were broader, his chest thicker, and
his muscles, though not so well knit as Anderson's, were bigger. There was,
however, no economy in his movements. When he walked, he lumbered. When he
stood, he slouched. He endured the strain of the day's labor better than Buddy
simply because he had more material to endure with. In this he was brutish,
but worse than being brutish, Neil was dumb, and worse than being dumb, he was
mean.
_He is mean_, Buddy thought, _and he is dangerous_. Buddy set off down
the row of corn, a full bucket of sap in either hand and his heart brimming
with ill-will. It gave him a sort of strength, and he needed all the strength
he could muster, from whatever source. His breakfast had been light, and
lunch, he knew, wouldn't be quite enough, and there'd be no dinner to speak
of.
Even hunger, he had learned, provided its own kind of strength: the will
to wrest more food from the soil and more soil from the Plants.
No matter how much care he took, the sap splattered his pants legs as he
walked, and the tattered fabric stuck to his calf. Later, when the day was