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

moons orbit, they create vast tidal currents and storms in the upper reaches
of the planet’s turbulent atmos-phere. This is where the Jellyfish People of
Tryllifandillor live.

Hi-ho.

The Jellyfish People would not be recognized as sentient beings by
human beings. A Jellyfish Per-son begins as a glistening pink seed of
possibility, three meters in length. It doesn’t hatch, it doesn’t sprout; one
day it slowly and gracefully unfurls itself to become a soaring
umbrella-shaped veil, two or three kilometers in diameter, and trailing many
long strands of translucent beads.




A Jellyfish moves by sailing the winds of
Tryllifandillor’s upper atmosphere, spreading its sail to rise on the warm
thermals, crumpling its edges inward to fall again, curling its edges this way
and that to catch the various gaseous currents that sweep across the vast
troposphere. As it drifts, it filters the warmth of its world for bits of
proto-organics, silicates, and various trace metals—not so much feeding on
the flying detritus as assem-bling itself from the available materials.

The young Jellyfish seed by the thousands. They travel in swarms,
and until they are large enough to sustain a self-aware webwork in their
umbra, they are feral. They are vicious predators. They will seek out larger
Jellyfish and lash their veils with their strings of sharp beads, slashing the
hap-less giants and shredding them into fragments. The young will eat their
own parents, incorporating bits and pieces of nascent sentience. If there
are no parent Jellyfish in their jetstreams, the young will feed upon each
other.

Over time, a Jellyfish will reach an extended diameter of hundreds of
kilometers. The oldest and wisest of the people are more than a thousand
kilometers across.

The veils of a Jellyfish are limned with faint glowing traceries—a
webwork of nano-scale gan-glia that give the vast creature its impenetrable
infinite wisdom. The more intricate the webwork, the more intelligent the
creature is—and the more attractive it is to its fellows. Jellyfish
communicate and interact by displaying coruscating patterns of shape and
color along their vast flanks.

Adult Jellyfish are so large, they function as giant nets. They take in
far more energy than they can use. To survive, they must burn off the extra
kilocalories. They do this by—
 Filk hesitated. He always hesitated when he had to make up a word.
Finally he half-smiled and uttered an approving grunt.