"John Varley - Gaea 3 - Demon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

around the location were klieg trees, already twenty meters high and getting
bigger at the rate of two meters per rev.
Forty-five revs after the death of the scout the advance party of
carpenters, teamsters, and vintners arrived. Carpenters were hairless animals
the size of grizzly bears, all alike except for their teeth, which were wildly
specialized. Some had beaver incisors, capable of gnawing down a tree with a
few dozen bites. Others had a single projecting tooth two meters long, notched
on one edge, which could saw beams and planks from raw timber. There were
carpenters with trapezoidal teeth. These could bite the end of a plank in
tenons, ready for dovetailing. Others had drill-bit teeth. Twisting their
heads vigorously, they could ream out a mortise.
In Gaea, a team of forty carpenters was called a union.
All the carpenters had quite human hands, except that each finger ended
in a nail shaped for a different utility. The palms of the hands were as
different as human fingerprints. Some were hard and horny, some were deeply
grooved or pebbled, while others were smooth as a jeweler's rubbing cloth.
With these hands the carpenters could plane and sand wood to a wondrous
luster. The distance from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger
of each carpenter was exactly the same: fifty centimeters.

In a few revs, the platforms, soundstages, archives building, and scores
of chapels had begun to take shape.
The vintners were one-purpose creatures. All they did was move onto the
location and devour clusters of small white grapes. The plants that bore the
fruit were not grapevines, but the fruit were, for all practical purposes,
grapes. The vintners ate them all, then fell into a torpor from which they
would never emerge. But in thirty revs they could be tapped for an excellent
white chablis.
The teamsters were something else again. In a place where a union of
carpenters was well within the norm, the teamsters stood out as weird.
Teamsters looked something like hippos, but were five times the size of
elephants. They were land whales mincing along on six legs just thick enough
to support them in Gaea's low gravity. Three of them arrived at the valley and
started eating the plants that had grown from the scout's spores.
There were many kinds of plants. Each variety went to a different
stomach. The teamsters had eleven separate sets of digestive organs.
When the field was cleared, the teamsters moved to the side and fell
over, somnolent as the vintners. Their legs withered until the animals were
little more than bulging bladders lined with row upon row of nipples in a
bewildering variety of shapes and colors. But the teamsters retained their
mouths for a little longer. They would eat the union of carpenters when
construction was done.
Gaea's operations were always tidy.
Things started to really pop when the production crew began trickling
in.
There were hordes of skittering little bolexes, brainlessly pointing
themselves in all directions and whirring fruitlessly, too stupid to know they
needed re-loading. They spotted the teamsters and began fighting for a teat
like piglets after a weary sow. Their excited cries sounded like meet meet!
meet!