"Joe Haldeman - None So Blind (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

mass, of course, since the cows would step on the lambs and kids and
the goats
would make everybody nervous, leaping and butting, so there are
partitions of
barbed wire that keep all the species separate and happy.
This is a frenetic sort of meadow, though, with cows and goats and
sheep coming
in and going out all the time, moving at about 3 x 108 meters per
second, and if
the partitions were all of the same size it would be a disaster,
because
sometimes there are no sheep at all, but lots of cows, who would be
jammed in
there hip to hip and miserable. But the shepherd, being wise, knows
ahead of
time how much space to allot to the various creatures and, being magic,
can move
barbed wire quickly without hurting himself or the animals. So each
partition
winds up marking a comfortable-sized space for each use. Your computer
does
that, too, but instead of barbed wire you see little rectangles or
windows or
file folders, depending on your computer's religion.
The brain has its own partitions, in a sense. Cletus knew that certain
physical
areas of the brain were associated with certain mental abilities, but
it wasn't
a simple matter of "music appreciation goes over there; long division
in that
corner." The brain is mushier than that. For instance, there are pretty
well-defined partitions associated with linguistic functions, areas
named after
French and German brain people. If one of those areas is destroyed, by
stroke or
bullet or flung frying pan, the stricken person may lose the ability--
reading or
speaking or writing coherently--associated with the lost area.
That's interesting, but what is more interesting is that the lost
ability
sometimes comes back over time. Okay, you say, so the brain grew back--
but it
doesn't! You're born with all the brain cells you'll ever have. (Ask
any child.)
What evidently happens is that some other part of the brain has been
sitting
around as a kind of back-up, and after a while the wiring gets rewired
and
hooked into that back-up. The afflicted person can say his name, and
then his