"Nebula Awards 2002 - The Nominated Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

A machine, even one as sophisticated as this Reggiesystems model, is not given to sighing, though one might
imagine this model had many occasions to do so. What Reggie did was increase his pauses and slow down his
speech delivery.
“What is meant by ‘frequency,’ Axel—“ Reggie explained it all carefully. Axel faced another wall of numbers and
made another choice—exactly the same way he’d made the first.
The numbers disappeared and the screensaver images returned. Axel watched it as avidly as if he’d never seen
them before.
“Reggie has reserved time on the radio telescope at Mount Herrmann. The message can be sent at 13:47 our time
this afternoon, when their first shift team breaks for lunch.”
“Wow!” Axel’s head reared back. “Thank you, Reggie. Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you!”
“Reggie still needs one more piece of information.”
“What’s that?”
Very slowly, Reggie said, “The message, please.”
“Oh, right!” Axel tried to remember the message he’d worked out during the night, as he’d peeked out from
under the blankets and stared out through the window—at the rectangle of indigo speckled with pinpoints of
light—and imagined all the “space guys” out there. Space and Time and Time and Space—They might look like
Axel: blue theropods with coal-black eyes, tiny forepaws and clumpy feet—but without the long scar down his back;
or they might look like one of the other saurs—miniature tyrannosaurs or ceratopsians or long-necked sauropods or
crested hadrosaurs. Or they might look like human guys, or birds, or jellyfish, or clouds—
“What is the message?” Reggie asked.
“Okay-okay-okay. The message—“ Axel held out the last syllable as long as he could to buy a little more time.
“—is—it’s—‘Hiya!’”
“That is the message?”
“Yeah.”
“The complete message?” Reggie didn’t often emphasize his adjectives that way.
“I don’t know. Is that enough? What else should I say?”
Reggie paused long enough to formulate an appropriate answer. “You may say as much or as little as you like,
but it is customary to tell the recipient of a message who you are.”
“Why?”
It may just have been a function of the old hard drive (technology had long since moved past the use of them),
but Axel heard a strange, almost nervous, clicking coming from inside the brain box.
“Because the recipient might possibly—for some reason completely unknown to Reggie—want to send a
message back to you, in reply.”
“Heyyy—“ Axel imagined the screensaver running backward—you could do that if you looked at it hard
enough—back through space the other way. “Space guys! Yeah!”
“You may also want to tell them a little about yourself,” Reggie suggested. “Where you live. What you do.
Where you come from—just to be friendly.”
“Ohhh! Yes! Got it! Yes! I can say—‘Hiya! I’m Axel, and I live in this big house and I’m here with all my friends.
We’re saurs, you know, all of us except for the human who brings us food and cleans up stuff. His name is Tom. But
we’re saurs!
“’Saurs are like dinosaurs. They were these really big guys who lived a long time ago and went extinct. We’re
supposed to look like them except we’re smaller and we don’t have the scary parts.
“’We came from a factory that was like a laboratory too, and we were made out of living stuff—you know,
biology.
“’They made millions of us and sold us to humans as toys. All these human guys who made us made big, big
money and drove around in giant bankmobiles and wore top hats and had houses a thousand times bigger than this
place. But then they had to stop selling us.
“’Turned out we were smarter than we were supposed to be, and lived longer. This lady from the Atherton
Foundation said we weren’t toys at all but real-real-real things that were alive and they shouldn’t be selling us.
“’But we kept getting cut up and run over, or the kids who owned us stepped on us or threw us out of windows.