"Mike Resnick & David Gerrold - Jellyfish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

Filk took an involuntary step back. Startled.

Brown took that as assent and pushed the door open. He stepped in.
The door shut itself behind him. Without Brown touching it. Filk’s eyes
narrowed. “You a lawyer?”

“Lawyer?” Brown considered the word. “I am. Representing. Yes.”
Then he added, “But not. Lawyer.”

Filk scratched himself. First his belly, then his head. Then his neck.
He itched a lot. Especially when he was awake. “Okay. Fine. What do you
want?”

“It is not. What I want. It is. What. Tryllifilli— excuse me. Tryllifandillor.
Wants.”

“What?”

“You. Stop. Writing. About. Trylli. Fandillor. Ians.”

Filk frowned. “Can’t,” he said, unconsciously imitating Brown’s
staccato hesitation.

“Existence. Is unstabilized. If Tryllifand. Illor. Exists. It stops.”

It took Filk a long moment to decode that sen-tence. He stood
unmoving. To an external observer, he would have seemed catatonic.
When Filk had to consider things, he also had to consid-er all of the
sidetracks and tangents and associated spin-offs attached to them, the
curse of being a sci-fi writer. It usually took a while.

In this case, Filk had to remember what he had written about
Tryllifandillor yesterday. Yesterday? Yes. Tryllifandillor exists only in the
realm of non-existence. By writing about it, he was threatening to move it
into the realm of existence, in which case it would cease to exist in the
realm of non-existence. It would stop being non-being. As soon as it
became possible in the universe of existence, it would stop existing in the
universe of non-existence. It would be the end of their existence as
non-existent beings. The Law of Conservation of Sentience. Good. He tried
to repress a smile. That was certainly good enough for another three
hundred words. He could finish his pages today.

The room was empty.

Filk put on the kettle to boil. Brown had not been his usual
hallucination, but he had been a very useful one. He wondered if this had
been a side-effect of the small brown pills in the small brown bottle in the
drawer of his nightstand. Maybe. It might be useful to explore the
pharma-ceutical aspects of this situation in some depth.