"Thomas Easton - Organic Future 02 - Greenhouse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

PRELUDE



To the Eldest and her sisters, the glass that protected their narrow
gallery from sky and weather was as plain to "see" as the dark walls that
shielded them from public view. Their senses were not quite of the human kind,
and it was not difficult for them to register the infrared that glowed from
both sorts of solid surface. Yet they could also respond to visible
wavelengths, and thus they could watch both the swayings of the overhanging
palm fronds and citrus branches that tempered the bright sunlight and the
movements of tree limbs and clouds and sun beyond the glass.

They could also feel. They could feel temperature and dry and wet, and if
they could, they would have smiled when the pipes that arched between their
shade plants and the glass spewed misting showers to keep the dryness from
their leaves and blossoms and the rich soil that embraced their bulbs.

The Eldest and her sisters could hear as well, but they could not speak.
They could not, in fact, communicate in any ways that humans would easily have
understood. They talked to each other by the slight bendings of their stems,
the curlings of their leaves, and mainly by the drifts of fragrance that rode
the steady current of air that flowed from the Eldest down the gallery past
all the rest. In due time, when the air had swept through all the other
passages of their dwelling, those odors would return. But they would be
diluted then, spread out and weakened, and of course delayed. The Eldest thus
spoke always with the first and loudest voice, and no sister could threaten
her dominance. So long as no one rearranged the gallery or tampered with the
ventilation system, so the situation would remain. And so long as the Eldest
gave no orders for change, their ordered rank and the air currents that swept
their messages along the gallery would be undisturbed. She would, of course,
order no disturbance of the status quo, for much of her heredity dictated a
properly hierarchical sense of her own importance in the larger scheme of
things.

Now the Eldest let a long leaf curl and straighten while she twisted on
her stem to peer down the gallery and be sure she had the attention of her
sisters. She might have sighed if she had had lungs. Those sisters...She was
the Eldest by only a little. All had had time to reach their full growth. But
only she had reached a size consistent with maturity. The others were small
and stunted. Some were deformed in minor, inconsequential ways. And the next
generation would have to be worse. Certainly it could be no better. Unless...

Finally, she released a small puff of intricately intermingled odors. Her
message was simple, and each member of her retinue added to it comments, so
that what the listener furthest downdrift sensed was something rather like:

"WE ARE HANDICAPPED
Cannot leave our beds
Destiny and progeny demand