"David Zindell - Shanidar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

were -- and still are. They came to this world on the first wave of the swarming, when Old Earth
was young and, some say, as radioactive as plutonium. Cavemen! They wanted to be cavemen! So they
back-mutated their chromosomes, destroyed their ship, and went to live in the frozen forests. And
now their great-grandchildren's great-great-grandchildren hunt mammoths for meat and die long
before they've seen their hundredth winter."

"But they die happy," the young man said.

"Who knows how they die?" I said to him. "Goshevan wanted to know. He sought me out because it was
said that once as a journeyman I had pioneered the operation he wanted, cutting on my very own
self to prove my worth as a flesh changer. 'Make me into an Alaloi,' he begged me, in this very
room where we presently drink our coffee and kvass. And I told him, 'Go to any of the cetics in
this quarter and they will cure you of your delusions.' And he said, 'I will p-pay you ten million
talanns!' But his farsider money was worthless in the Unreal City and I told him so. 'Diamonds,'
he said. 'I've two thousand carats of Yarkona bluestars.' 'For that price,' I said, 'I can add
eight inches to your spine or make you into a beautiful woman. I can lighten your skin and make
your hair as white as a Jacaranda courtesan's.' Then he looked at me cunningly and said, 'I'll
trade information for your services: I know the fixed-points of Agathange.' I laughed at him and
asked, 'How is it you know what the pilots of our city have been seeking for three thousand
years?'

"Well, it happened that he did know. With the riches from the sale of his estates, he had bought
the secret of the location of that fabled world from a renegade pilot he had met on Darkmoon. I
consulted our city archives: the librarians were very excited. They sent a young pilot to verify
my information, and I told Goshevan we might have to wait two or three hundred days before we
would know.

"Ten thousand city disks his information was worth! The pilot who rediscovered Agathange was very
good. Phased into his light ship, the Infinite Sloop, proving the theorems of probabilistic
topology -- or whatever it is that our famous pilots do when they wish to fall through the space
that isn't space -- he rushed through the fallaways, fenestering from window to window with such
precision and elegance that he returned from Agathange in forty days.

"'You can be a rich man,' Goshevan said to me on a clear, sparkling day of false winter. 'Do as I
ask and all the disks are yours.'

"I hesitated not for a moment. I took him into the changing room and I began to cut. It was a
challenge, I lied to myself, a test of knowledge and skill -- to a dedicated cutter, it wasn't
disks that mattered. I enlarged the basal bone of his jaw and stimulated the alveolar bone to
maximal growth so that his face could support the larger teeth I implanted. The angle of the face
itself I broadened so that there would be more room for a chewing apparatus strong enough to crack
marrowbones. And of course, since the face jutted out farther from the skull, I had to build up
the brow ridge with synthetic bone to protect the eyes. And though this shaping took the better
part of winter, it was only the beginning.

"As he writhed beneath my lasers and scalpels, all the while keeping his face as quiet and blank
as a snowfield, I went to work on his body. To support his huge new muscles -- which were grown by
the Fravashi deep-space method -- I built him new bones. I expanded the plates and spicules of the
honeycombed interior and strengthened the shafts and tendon attachments, adding as much as three
millimeters to the cortices of the longer bones such as his femur. I stippled his skin. I went