"Walter Jon Williams - Surfacing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

seemed filled with an exemplary clarity; he worked rapidly, with burning efficiency. His body felt
energized.




3




He was out of the cold Kirst Current today, in a warm, calm subtropical sea on the other side of the Las
Madres archipelago. The difference of forty nautical miles was astonishing.

The sun warmed his back. Sweat prickled on his scalp. The sea sparkled

under a violet sky.

The other Dweller answered.

Through his bare feet, Anthony could feel the subsonic overtones vibrating through the boat. Something
in the cabin rattled. The microphones recorded the sounds, raised the subsonics to an audible level,
played it back. The computer made its attempt.

A9140 was a phrase that, as yet, had no translation.

The Dweller language, Anthony had discovered, had no separation of subject and object; it was a trait in
common with the Earth cetaceans whose languages Anthony had first learned. “I swim toward the
island” was not a grammatical possibility: “I and the island are in a condition of swimming toward one
another” was the nearest possible approximation.

The Dwellers lived in darkness, and, like Earth’s cetaceans, in a liquid medium. Perhaps they were

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 Surfacing

psychologically unable to separate themselves from their environment, from their fluid surroundings.
Never approaching the surface—it was presumed they could not survive in a non-pressurized
environment—they had no idea of the upper limit of their world.

They were surrounded by a liquid three-dimensional wholeness, not an air-earth-sky environment from
which they could consider themselves separate.

A high-pitched whooping came over the speakers, and Anthony smiled as he listened. The singer was
one of the humpbacks that he had imported to this planet, a male called The One with Two Notches on
His Starboard Fluke.

Two Notches was one of the brighter whales, and also the most playful. Anthony ordered his computer
to translate the humpback speech.