"Brian Plante - Something Meaningful" - читать интересную книгу автора (Plante Brian)

waves in the brain. When you have been with us long enough, you will become
more adept at reading and projecting thought patterns.

But I want to go home.

That is not possible.

Well then, what do you propose to do with me?

We will find something meaningful for you to do. Come along.

****

Over the next few months, I learned to become a Canopian and control the
strange blue body. Call it physical therapy. More than just learning the correct mental
commands to make my body parts do what I wanted, I had to unlearn the human
patterns. It worked best when I didn’t think about it too much. As Ecreath
explained, my new body already had a “muscle memory” for most common
motions…walking, picking things up, eating. I only had to think about what I wanted
it to do, and let the body take over.

Ecreath remained my teacher. True to his word, the Canopians tried to make
me comfortable, although I was a square peg in a convoluted hole. At first, I was
surprised at how much of the ship was transparent. The Canopians seemed to not
have any need for privacy. When I had asked Ecreath about sleeping arrangements,
he replied, You have been with us three of your Earth days. Are you feeling sleepy?


It hadn’t occurred to me up to that point, but I was not sleepy. Ecreath
explained that the need for sleep was a condition that the Canopians could have
cured the humans of, but the daily sleep cycles seemed such an ingrained part of our
psyche that they thought it best not to interfere. Canopians just went about their
business all the time without resting.

Eating like a Canopian was also something I had to learn. They primarily ate
several varieties of a yellow fluff that was grown shipboard in large spongelike mats.
It was some kind of fungus-like material, and I learned how to appreciate and select
good fluff from the nearly identical but deadly variety that grew side by side along
with it. The poisonous fluff was a different stage in the lifecycle of the fungus-fluff,
and therefore impossible to eliminate. You just had to know there was some poison
hiding in all the good food, and trust your judgement in picking the right one.

There was also a mildly hallucinogenic syrup the Canopians drank that I liked
quite a bit. It didn’t taste too bad for whatever gustatory organs I had, and it made
me remember, for short periods of time, what it was to be a human, and imagine that
I could be human once again.

I learned why Canopians kept popping up all over the Earth to heal the sick.
You humans are not a very trusting people, Ecreath thought-spoke. That is fairly
common among the intelligent races. Caution is a valuable trait in the early