"Alan Dean Foster - Interlopers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

conciseness. Considering how fast her mind and mouth worked, he was astonished in retrospect at how
intently she listened.
Khuatupec was beside himself, literally as well as figu-ratively. The food was moving away! There was nothing
he could do but fume silently, exactly as he had for hundreds of years.
Nor was he alone. Amnu writhed inside her tree as the food almost, but not quite, brushed against one of its
branches. Tsemak twitched below the ground, inexorably wedded to his slice of subsurface stratum. Chakasx
hummed within the stream that served as both home and prison. Throughout the citadel, the mountain, and
the fortresslike slopes that had protected the Chachapoyans of Apachetarimac for centuries, They stirred.
Moved about
15
Ilan lean fester
and were active as they had not been for more than five hundred years.
In that time, other food had come close, though none had been so tasty as this promised to be. Its sheer
virgin delectability was unprecedented in Khuatupec's long ex-perience. To have it pass so close, on so many
occasions, was maddening. There was nothing he or any of the others could do. In order to eat, it was the
food that would have to make proper contact with them. They could not leave their situs to initiate feeding. It
was an infuriating, horrific existence, mitigated only by the fact that Khuatupec's kind were almost impossible
to kill. Yet, he thought furiously, to suffer near immortality in a state of perpetual craving was as much curse
as good fortune.
Even worse than not being able to feed on such delectables was the thought that contact might be made with
another of his kind instead of him. Watching another feed in his place would be almost as intolerable as not
being able to feed himself. Should that occur, there would remain only the hope of snatching up some
carelessly discarded leftovers from the main feeding.
It might not come to that. He could still be the first. Thus far, none had managed to feed on the newly arrived
food, although a week ago Sachuetet had come close. She had been too quick, however, from an eagerness
to eat born of hundreds of years of abstinence. Sensing that something was not right, the food had freed itself
before Sachuetet had been able to begin feeding fully. Her agonized cry of frustration and loss had resounded
throughout the mountain.
From the others she drew no solace. Khuatupec and his kind knew nothing of compassion. They knew only
how to wait, and to eat. The light was vanishing from the mountain as if sucked up by the ground. Light or
dark, day or night, it was all the same to Khuatupec and the
others. They never slept, not in the thousands of years of their existence. As a concept, sleep was known to
them. Food, for example, slept. Trees and rocks and water did not. Khuatupec and Anmu and Tsemak and
the others did not. Even if they had known how to go about initiating the process, it was something they
would have avoided assiduously. Self-evidently, sleeping was dangerous. Sleeping was risky.
Sleep, and you might miss a feeding.
Two
As Coschocton Westcott and Rely Alwydd had suspected it would, the second skull did indeed drive Kimiko
Samms crazy. Struggling with her laptop, supplementing the information stored on her hard drive with disc
after disc of data, the expedition's forensics, expert could find no medical condition compatible with a culture
as ancient as that of the Chachapoyans that might account for the spectac-ular and unsettling hole in the
cloven skull. Such an extensive, presumably violent perforation should have driven the cranial bone inward, or
shattered the surface into small fragments. Due to the age of the subject material, she could not even
determine if whatever had caused the inexplicable calcareous formation was the cause of its owner's death.
"C'mon," Kelli asked her one day, "surely somebody couldn't walk around with a cranial deformation like
that!" The diminutive Samms was noncommittal. "People with far worse deformities have survived. The
Elephant Man, lepers, Asian and African peoples suffering from severe elephantiasis, ancient dwarves and
hunchbacks-you'd be surprised."
19
"It's not the circular bone ridge that makes me wonder, extreme as it is." Standing alongside the