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

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THE NEXT DAY, without rereading anything he had previously typed, Filk
began typing again:

Because of their size, the Tryllifandillorians func-tion as vast radio
antennae, and they can easily sense the long-wave vibrations of their
universe.

Just as jellyfish in the sea are sensitive to the ebb and flow of the
tides, so are the Jellyfish of Tryllifandillor tuned into the peaks and troughs
of the millennial rhythms of time. They can feel the rise and fall of universal
emotion that underlies the existence that does exist—what we would call
the universe. The universe of existence is very sparsely inhabited. At any
given moment, there have never been more than twelve sentient races at a
time. This is because there is a limiting factor in the uni-verse. It is called
the Law of Conservation of Sentience. Almost every time a new sentient
species arises, at least one or more of the older ones self-destructs, or
simply dies out from exhaustion.

Because there are so few sentient species in such a vast arena, the
emotional radiation from each individual race will stand out in the night like a
beacon. Any profound event that happens to any sentient species
resonates throughout the Sevagram the same way ripples of sound radiate
outward from the violent plucking of a taut violin string. Eventually, as it
makes its way from existence to non-existence, the resonance will reach
the Tryllifandillorians.

On this particular day, something happened in the realm of existence
that was so startling that when the ripples reached non-existence, it
unset-tled an entire frelch, producing the Tryllifandillorian equivalent of a
false note. The false note was immediately recontextualized as the
ground-of-being for an entire new frelch, based solely on the moment of
discordance.

But this particular moment of discordancy was the essence of
discordancy and refused to be recon-textualized. Even in its own frelch, in
the realm of impossibility, it stood out as an impossible thing.

Apparently, something in the universe of exis-tence had become
aware of the universe of non-existence. Even more startling, it had become
aware of the existence of impossibility. And in its most astonishing
realization, that thing that had become aware, had also become aware of
the exis-tence of the non-existent Tryllifandillorians. The external
knowledge of the frelch had soured not only this frelch, but the possibility of
all frelching forever after.

For the Tryllifandillorians, this was unthinkable.