"Kelly,_James_Patrick_-_Ninety_Percent_of_Everything" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

The odor of a fresh shitdog casting was legendary. The Marines said it was like having barbed wired shoved up your nose. It smelled nothing like the excrement of any animal on earth; rather it was biting and bleachy, with just a hint of burning brakes. The castings were composed of long chain polymers, which, when first expelled, were one of the most adhesive substances ever known. The castings cured to a rubbery consistency in about a week, after which time their stench was slightly ameliorated. Because the shitdogs returned again and again to the same area to excrete, some suggested that their behavior was purposeful and that their piles were in fact 'buildings', constructed in much the same way the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids. I found this theory to be unsupported by the evidence. They had built two roughly conical piles at the Eastline site in the last six years. Each was approximately thirty meters tall; they were now at work on a third. There were similar piles at the other sites.
Public interest in the shitdogs peaked when the first 'finished' pile of castings sprouted a two meter tall crystalline growth at its peak -- the so-called jewels. Outwardly this formation resembled quartz in that it crystallized in the trigonal trapezohedral class of the rhombohedral subsystem of hexagonal symmetry. In their brilliancy, prismatic fire and color variation, the jewels were nothing like quartz. After long and rancorous debate, a team of scientists tried to retrieve the jewels from the first Ethiopian pile, using lasers manipulated from a helicopter platform. However, as soon as the jewels were taken from the pile, they dissolved into a slurry of shitdog casting. Subsequent attempts, including one in Nevada in which I myself participated, met with similar results. The jewels appeared to be artifacts of the internal chemistry of a finished pile. When you cut them off, they melted, and the pile began to regenerate a new formation. No one knew why.
We in the shitdog studies community suffered from severe fact deprivation. No shitdog had ever died, and to destroy one for the purposes of dissection was unthinkable. Besides, no one had devised a way to catch a shitdog, much less kill one. Attempts had been made to herd them offsite to field laboratories but, when confronted with manmade obstacles, they emitted a string of their famous barks and retreated. The Chileans captured one once, using a flying crane and a specially constructed claw-shaped cage. They lowered the cage onto a shitdog which was in a digestive stupor and the claw swung shut. This roused the beast and it began to bark piteously and hurl itself against the cage with a vigor not previously observed in any of its kind. Its actions were so violent that the helicopter was unable to lift the cage off the ground safely. Ten minutes later the shitdog had eaten its way to freedom.
Unfortunately, except for devotees of xenophobic mediants, a scattering of conspiracy-addled loons, and few scientists like myself, the world had lost interest in the shitdogs. Funding dried up. And why not? Their behavior was inscrutable, their origin a mystery, their nature repellent and their treasure ephemeral.
So why was Ramsdel Wetherall buying salt flats near Eastline, Nevada?
* * * *
"I take it you've seen the jewels in person?" I said.
"I've been to all five sites."
I whistled. "Even Gobi?"
"I spent an hour last month hovering over Gobi B, close enough to touch the cluster. It has a red..." He shut his eyes and his face softened with pleasure. I've seen men look that way after sex or just before cutting into filet mignon and once in front of the Botticelli frescos at the Louvre, but never remembering a rhombohedron. "They're the most exquisite things I've ever seen," said Ramsdel Wetherall.
Well, at least he was right about that. Then I got suspicious. "Wait a minute. A whole hour? This doesn't have anything to do with Cosmic Lighthouse Keepers?"
He crumpled his ice cream wrapper and tossed it at the trash can on the other side of the van. It missed. "You don't believe that the jewels might be windows to other realities and the piles are their batteries?"
"Oh, it's windows and batteries now?" I said. "Last summer Thorp was claiming they were some kind of beacons. Look, a theory explains observations, Mr. Wetherall. Did you observe another reality?"
"Not yet." He gave me a dreamy stare. "My friends call me Wetherall."
* * * *
Everyone had heard of the unfortunate Dr. Blaine Thorp who, after inadvertently getting a smudge of shitdog casting on his right hand, was driven by the smell to perform the self-amputation that almost killed him. Most people assumed that this famous accident occurred during the course of some kind of scientific experiment, a misapprehension which Thorp was happy to encourage. In fact _Doctor_ Thorp's only advanced degree was from the Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa. He was a hobbyist and a crackpot and possibly the worst thing to happen to exobiology since the shitdogs ate their landers. Nevertheless he relentlessly promoted himself as the Ahab of the shitdogs, a man whose unique intimacy with these mysterious creatures had somehow given him true insight into their nature. Or should I say insights; his theories about the shitdogs were as variable as the weather. He announced that the shitdogs do their math in base five. He discerned linguistic symbolism in the paths of their tunneling through the salt flats. He claimed he could tell their emotional state from the color of their castings. And the jewels ... they were either talismans of alien enlightenment or religious icons of an interstellar coprophagology cult or sculptures designed to transform human perception or, as of last Thursday, or whenever Wetherall had spoken to Thorp, windows to other realities.
* * * *
"If you're in this with Thorp, you'd better just pull over and let me out right here," I said. "He's a fake."
"He didn't fake his accident. I shook his hook when we met."
"I'll grant he's missing a hand. For all I know a crocodile bit it off when he was living in Never-Never land. For that matter, why hasn't he had it replaced?"
He permitted himself a smile. "Are you always this uncharitable, Liz?"
"About lunatics like Thorp? Yes."
"I take it you've met him then? I found him very ... persuasive."
"I debated him on _Channel Lore_ two years ago and I still haven't gotten the bad taste out of my mouth." I leaned forward and thrust my right hand at him so that my mother's diamond ring was about ten centimeters from the bridge of his nose. "Look, Wetherall, you want to go on a magical mystery tour? Just stare at this and hold your breath until you pass out. It'll save us both a lot of time and money."
"Money is not a problem, Liz." He gently but firmly pushed my hand away. His skin was cool. "I want to build a house as close as possible to the jewel formation growing on Eastline A. Thorp need not be involved. I need a shitdog expert, Liz -- the best there is. I need you."
I tried not to be flattered. "A house! What about the big stink?"
"One man's problem is another man's opportunity," he said. "The stink has its uses."
"Such as?"
He gestured at the inside of the Jolly Freeze truck. "I'm a man who values privacy as much as great beauty."
I let that go, for now. "Okay. You build a mansion with a picture window that overlooks the jewels. You get yourself the best gas mask money can buy. How are you going to keep the shitdogs from eating your basement?"
"Have you ever heard of Nguyen O'Hara?"
At that moment I realized that the van was no longer moving and the music had stopped.
* * * *
First Thorp, now O'Hara. Was Wetherall attracted to eccentrics? Maybe that's why he had chosen me. Not because of all the time I'd spent studying the shitdogs, but because I'd been raised by eccentrics and had learned to tolerate, if not appreciate, strangeness. But how could he know that?
I hoped he hadn't found my aunts.
* * * *
"Nguyen O'Hara, the lighter-than-air architect?" I said. "The man who floats slums? Didn't he win the Nobel Prize for Hype?"
"Mexico City would have sunk into the mire by now if its _colonias_ weren't aloft. O'Hara's a genius."
"Putting the poor in balloons works for about eight minutes," I said. "First come the tourists, then the developers, and before long the floating neighborhood is all candle shops and jewelry stands. Meanwhile ninety percent of the families -- the ones not finding a niche in tee-shirt sales -- are forced into some brand new slum that's ten miles from nowhere. Pretty sleazy if you ask me. Anyway, those bubbleshacks are hardly a billionaire's digs."
"He calls it lifthousing," said Wetherall. "And you've never seen Laputa."
"Laputa?"
"O'Hara's private lifthouse. I've arranged for Nguyen himself to give you the tour."
Although I hadn't yet said I was interested in his project, Wetherall had read me like an annual report. There was no way I could turn him down -- not when he was offering what could be unprecedented access to the shitdogs. "I could clear some time at the end of the week, maybe Friday afternoon."
"Now," he said.
"Now?" I said. The thought I was even now skipping the Curriculum Committee meeting made me feel strangely giddy.
"I'd want you and Nguyen to meet each other as soon as possible." Wetherall came around the desk. "I'm a great believer in team chemistry, Liz. I need to know whether we can all work together."
"I'm afraid that's out of the question. I have duties, not just to the university and the department, but to my students. I'll have to reschedule my appointments, make arrangements for..."
He patted my shoulder. "That's what avatars are for."
"I don't have an avatar."
"It'll all be taken care of." He ducked past my chair and opened the door of the van; we were parked on a runway. There was a jet with a picture of Judy Jolly Freeze on its tail fin about twenty meters away.