"Tricia Sullivan - The Question Eaters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sullivan Tricia)

With a stricken sense of dйjа vu, John watched the crone place the mass
she had been holding on the sand. It was a twisted, soft, creeping thing,
like a lizard turned inside out. He saw the dark sand cling to its flesh,
if flesh was what it was. He saw the moisture hovering around it as
radiance.
The crone looked straight at him from her withered eyes. "Toad," she said.
"Wombtoad. Desertoad."
"Understand?" hissed Sentient Baby, and he didn't.
The crone made gestures over the lizard and John watched it slowly crawl
away from the tent, into the fierce heat and the darkness.
The boy lay on the floor. His lips touched the water again. John was now
unable to move, to think of anything to put in his data coder. He wanted
the water, he wanted it.
"Die," said the boy. "Drink. Forget. Go."
John closed his eyes. He felt it when the boy's tongue touched the water,
when his throat and mouth sucked it up, when it burst down his throat and
into his body. It filled the boy and John as one: he swelled with it,
heavy and dense, suddenly pregnant and docile and serene. John found
himself looking directly at Sentient Baby: it rippled within its own skin,
shrinking before his eyes until it was the size of a stumpy worm. Then,
with a pop like a piece of computer animation, Sentient Baby was gone. The
tent and the others in it were shucked cleanly away from his awareness.
He was larger than the planet, and he looked down inside himself and saw
an ocean under golden light. He saw plant life and reptiles swimming in
the sea. But his attention flickered, and when he looked again he saw only
desert. He "remembered" the lizards dying in the heat and felt their
thirst. Then he was following the small lizard that the Crone had made,
watching it move slowly across the dark sand.
Observer experiencing deep empathy with lizard. So defenseless. Doomed.
Water creature cries for dry death. Unwomb eats unlife ends. Forgotten
sand spills quantity endless quantity shapeless lack of connective tissue
perhaps no brain ancephalon. Process. Three. Three over four three into
one into zero. Divide by zero equals. World without. Pure. Pure. Your
substance overwritten. Discrete moments collected. Whole greater than sum.
Deadly birth. Many minds like one mind, made of words. Surrounding. Ask
them. You have them. Ask them.
One: Just tell me if you really lived, and I will leave you.
Two: There was life; we were slaves to it.
One: Were you not those reptiles, swimming in the sea?
Two: Not animals. We are a kind of meaning that doesn't happen to belong
to you.
One: We don't claim ownership of you.
Two: All you have done since you came is crowd us out.
One: You weren't alive to be crowded--
Two: You fill yourselves and the world with reports, records,
transmissions, memos, stories, conversations, songs.... Our syntax is
disrupted. Your language violates us. You think to squeeze us out.
One: We don't seek to harm you! We're a research station. We're excited
that you're here. Well, I'm excited. We just want to know.
Two: Yes, your species is one enormous question. We have no tolerance of