"John Varley - Mammoth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

love, and to having babies.

But mammoth society was arranged according to what scientists call a social hierarchy, or
what chicken farmers call a pecking order. That means that one mammoth was on top of the
hierarchy—Big Mama—one was in second place, one in third place, and so on.

And that means somebody was on the bottom. That summer it was a seventeen-year-old female
named Temba.




6
MATTHEW Wright sat in his aluminum canoe and tried to think like a trout.

He was on Clear Lake, some dozen or so miles south of Mount Hood, in Oregon. He had been
told to relax. Take it easy. Take a few months off, find a hobby, something to take your mind off your
work. Because, frankly, Matt, people have been remarking about some of your behavior. No, you
haven't stripped naked and painted yourself blue and run through the Student Union shouting about
the end of the world, but you have been acting... well, a little unusual.

Matthew didn't precisely remember who it was that first suggested trout fishing as a suitable
avocation for a scientist on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

"Breakdown? Breakdown?" he muttered. "A long, long ways from a breakdown. I saw A
Beautiful Mind, too. That was a breakdown. All I was having was panic attacks."

One of Matthew's colleagues had commented, after seeing some of his preparations for his
future hobby, that if Matt had decided to take up snowboarding, step one would have been to
redesign snow, from the molecular level upward, and one day we'd all wake up to find that snow was
half as cold and twice as slippery as it had been before. Matthew Wright was just that kind of guy, the
kind who always starts from basics and goes logically from there.

Step one, in trout fishing, was to understand trout. How does a trout experience the universe?
What does he see? What does he think?
 To find out, Matt first went to Safeway and bought a trout, which he then dissected. He learned
a lot, including the fact that fish had hard, clear, spherical lenses in the middle of their eyes.

He read what others had learned about trout fishing. Where did they like to hide? What times of
day, what water temperature, what atmospheric conditions made the difference between fish that
were biting and fish that sulked in deep pools?

Using all the data he had collected he wrote a computer program, a virtual trout, in which he
could adjust twenty-seven variables. After a long series of runs on the computer he had charts of
optimum conditions. He could then cast a virtual fly into his program, and see if his cyber-trout was
interested enough to bite.

After a few weeks he bought a metal canoe, a twenty-five-foot trailer, a tackle box for his
specialized flies, and a rod and reel. He set out into the wilderness along a road that used to be part of
the Oregon Trail, only in reverse, feeling pleasantly like William Clark or Meriwether Lewis.