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

rolled over and died without a sound.

Filk walked over to the grimy window that opened out onto the alley
and stared at an old wooden fence that was sorely in need of paint. He had
just wiped out an entire sentient species. He tried to analyze how he felt
about it.

Not bad. No, not bad at all.

There was a lot you could do with that kind of power.

Of course.

****

ONCE UPON A time, when the world was young enough to still be wetting
its bed, there was a man named Darryl K. Fink.

Fink wrote stories.

Fink was a sci-fi writer.
 Unlike other sci-fi writers, Fink didn’t mind being a sci-fi writer.

But most of the others did mind. In fact, most of the others didn’t
even like the words “sci-fi,” so calling them sci-fi writers was like increasing
the water temperature in the turtles’ tank by fifteen degrees; it made them
aggressive and hyperactive, and sometimes even caused them to write
rather than merely talk about writing.

More often, though, they simply attacked each other.

Or slept with each other’s wives and husbands and significant others.
Or even their insignificant others. It made perfect sense—sex is a lot easier
than writing. You only have to please one person at a time. Yourself. Or two,
if you’re feeling excep-tionally generous.

Most sci-fi writers thought they were sci-fi writ-ers because they were
visionaries. The truth is most of them were sci-fi writers because they were
suffering from a contra-terminal disease and the sci-fi writing was a
symptom. The disease had no Earth name, because no Earth doctor had
discov-ered it yet, but it manifested itself as a kind of aggravated morphic
hypertrophy. That was the primary symptom. The disease itself was a
ninth-dimensional inflammation of a pinhead-sized organ on the posterior
part of the hypothalamus, which inflicted the victim with a vague sense of
the scale of time and space, and a corresponding degree of paranoia. In
human beings, this usually created a deep-rooted (and generally
unfounded) sense of self-importance.

However, at this particular confluence of time and space, the sci-fi
writers were justified in being both paranoid and self-important.