"Broderick, Damien - The Dreaming (The Dreaming Dragons)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Broderick Damien)

Fedorenko had just begun to speak. The physicist stopped at once. 'Yes, Dr delFord?'
'I'm sorry, my mind was wandering.' You're not in the Grope Pit now, fuckface. In this hard line company, his question would seem merely ludicrous. They were not accustomed to the non-logical starters of heuristic reciprocity.
'Feel free to speak. We cannot afford to be governed by the rules of formal debate.' Unlike the general's, Fedorenko's accent was a slightly thickened version of Oxbridge British. It reminded Bill of Anne's rather than his own 'red brick' Liverpudlian. As a very young man, the Russian physicist had worked in England on radio telescopes, before the Cold War had started in earnest.
Sevastyianov was giving him the nod. What the hell. Bill leaned forward toward Alf Dean. 'Do the local aboriginals have anything to say about the Rock?' It _was_ ludicrous. _Oligopithecus savagei_ might have been on the scene 25 megayears ago, but any word-of-mouth observations would have got a mite garbled in the interim.
Fedorenko apparently did not think so. Raising an eyebrow to Dean, he nodded in grave approval. The black man, clearly far from recovered after his ordeal, seemed happy to allow Fedorenko to pick up the ball.
'A penetrating question, Doctor. We did not consider the possibility at the outset. The earliest date for human arrival on this continent is roughly 100,000 years ago. Selene Alpha was a radioactive ruin long before that. Until Dr Dean's unorthodox appearance in the Vault chamber, we had not bothered to consult any anthropologist familiar with the local ethnographies. Of course, we had provisional analyses from exocultural specialists from our respective space programs.'
Unconsciously, the physicist had picked up a calculator, and his fingers played at random over the keys. 'Uluru is the traditional domain of the Pitjandjara tribesmen. Fortunately, by the time we started our probes the team were authorised by the Australian government to relocate the aborigines outside the area -- '
'Which wasn't easy,' Chandler cut in. 'The bleeding hearts started screaming "concentration camp" when we shifted the blacks.' The colonel stared blandly at Dean; clearly there had been words between them on the subject.
It was Fedorenko, though, who scowled angrily. 'I used the word "fortunate" only because the lesser evil forestalled a potentially greater one.'
There was a shadow in the room. Bill found nothing of sympathy within him. No doubt some of the men here had colleagues among the dead, among the ruined bodies in the melted desert. Though the mourning was done, some dull ache remained at the uselessness of their deaths. Yet these men in their military uniforms, and the civilians who served them, had shared, perhaps, in the deaths of scores of thousands. With a surge of hard bitterness that surprised him, Bill thought: The gluon shield might be used by just such men to murder thousands of millions. This time men had perished searching for traces of creatures from the stars, surely an enterprise touched with nobility, but there was no simple, honest way to grieve their passing.
Chandler had thrust his chair back gratingly. 'Yes, Dr Fedorenko, those men are dead, and more might have been if we hadn't used our muscle. Hell, I watched my boys coming out of Libya with their bellies blown open, with their guts flopping out in the sun.'
'Thank you, Colonel,' the huge Russian general said drily. 'I do not believe there is any need to stand.'
Chandler sat down. 'With respect, sir, I have to stress that we're moving into unknown territory. The excavation accident didn't stop us reaching the Vault chamber. We must get in there. The knowledge locked into that one facility will advance our technology a hundred years, maybe more.'
The general raised his formidable hand. 'I believe we all share a common motivation. Dr delFord, your conjecture about aboriginal legends was an inspired one. It also occurred to Dr Dean.'
The Australian straightened in his seat. 'I'm no expert on the Pitjandjara tribe, but I've had all the journals flown in during the last couple of days and it fits. As Victor mentioned, they've been relocated for their own protection. That's a tragedy in its own right, since it's only in the last decades that they've been ceded rights over this territory. They have clan territories adjoining Uluru, and I believe their sacred mythmakers had a lot to tell us about the Vault. Most myths are regional -- one of theirs isn't, and it's found among tribes thousands of kilometres away, tribes that don't share the same language.'
'The Rainbow Serpent,' Bill said, nodding. 'Hugh told me you were looking for bones when you found the teleport gate. But isn't the gate itself the source of the myth?'
'That was my first thought, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. Let me explain. Like most Australian aborigines, the Pitjandjara believe that during the _tjukurapa_ times -- the world's creation -- a number of cosmic entities performed various stupendous and valiant tasks which ultimately gave the universe its present shape and laws. When the Dreaming mysteriously ended, hills, watercourses and boulders appeared wherever these deeds had been done. Uluru itself is a huge catalogue of mythic beings and their deeds.'
'You figure they were aliens?'
'Certainly not.' The anthropologist looked offended. 'In the main, this is standard cosmogonic material, an animist version of Plato's theory of Forms. The beings commemorated in myth are the great totems: the Lizard men Kanju and Linga, the Willy-Wagtail woman Tjinderi-tjinderiba, the Mala Hare-Wallabies, Kulpunya the Spirit Dingo. These all obviously derive their liturgical importance from the daily search for food, shelter, and safety. They're the stuff of legend in any equivalent pre-technological society. But there's one creature which is quite different from the other _tjukurapa_ figures, the Rainbow Serpent -- known to the Pitjandjara as Wanambi.'
'Jung would probably locate it in the collective unconscious,' Bill said. 'If I may say so, I'm irresistibly reminded of other phallic potency symbols -- Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent on the pyramid temple at Teotihuacan, the Midgard Serpent, the Egyptian Buto, and the Great Serpent of the Hittites who fought the weather-god. It's certainly a common primary process image emerging in altered states of consciousness.'
'You did not mention the most famous one,' Victor Fedorenko said softly. 'Satan -- the Serpent who tempted us to our ruin with knowledge.'
'Oh, fuck,' Lowenthal said with disgust. 'Why don't you come right out with it and tell us there are some things man was not meant to know.'
The Russian physicist smiled ruefully. 'Harris, Pavlov would have loved you like a son. Did you know he used to fine his students every time one of them uttered a mentalistic word? Bill, Dr Lowenthal is our chief psychologist. He holds a low opinion of our working hypothesis. If you would find it amusing to witness an excellent mind weaving Ptolemaic epicycles around a barren worldview, ask Harris for his explanation of the automatic writings produced by young Mouse Dean.'
'Gentlemen, gentlemen, I must insist on decorum,' the general growled. 'Such personal exchanges are unseemly.'
'I don't maintain that the Serpent is an archetype or a Freudian symbol,' Bill said quickly. 'I'm merely stressing the great geographical and historical ubiquity of the image. Alf, are you attempting to relate the Wanambi to this more general datum, and also to the Vault itself? If so, I'm tempted to side with Harris.'
'How else does it add up? Look, I'm a structural-functionalist. I wrote a paper tearing the shit out of Castaneda before it was fashionable. I'm no fan of the occult.' There was something wrong with Dean's breathing, and he paused. His pupils seemed contracted. 'Bill, I don't know how they did it, but I think the Pitjandjara sorcerers were tuned into something from down in the Vault. They couldn't understand it, so they expressed it in terms of their own hunting-gathering view of the world. It's built into their legends.'
Pointedly, Lowenthal turned away from the discussion. Yeliseyev laughed with delight. He was the Russian Army engineer who had headed the design team for the tunnel down to the Vault. 'Despite our colleague's scepticism, I've heard stories from Science City in Novosibirsk that make me wonder. Perhaps I was too quick to accept the Kirlians' claims. But psychics have certainly achieved effects we engineers cannot match. So they offend us by calling themselves sorcerers? We must watch and learn. Sneering is no substitute for open-minded study.'
'Two weeks ago,' Alf Dean said, 'I wouldn't even have considered such a possibility. Since then I've seen what this god-awful place can squeeze out of a kid with massive cerebral damage.'
'Jesus! The entire Project is reverting to the Middle Ages.' The psychologist swung around, nodded toward Bill without meeting his eye. 'Bringing in this mystic from the lunatic fringe went against my express recommend -- '
The general's tone was ominous. 'Dr Lowenthal, you will observe the civilities.'
'There's a radical distinction,' the man said angrily, 'between being open-minded and having a hole in the head. So okay, little grey men in flying saucers set up house on the moon 25 million years ago. We know that. Big deal. There's absolutely no warrant for jumping from that slender datum to the insane conclusion that they're alive and well and lurking under the Big Rock to gobble us up.'
'No one -- '
Bill said, blinking: 'Gobble us up?' The room hummed with silence.
'Uh, the Wanambi isn't the most cordial beast in the world,' Alf Dean admitted. 'According to the Pitjandjara, the one under Uluru is particularly bad news. It was said to live in a cavern beneath the Uluru waterhole, at the top of Tjukiki gorge. If anyone drank from the hole, or started a fire there, the wanambi got a bit stroppy.'
'The return of the repressed,' Bill said feebly. The anthropologist took him seriously, and shook his head.
'Freud would find it rather tricky to account for the location of the Vault. It's almost directly under the Uluru waterhole ... three kilometres straight down.'
'If the tribal elders saw the weather outside right now,' Lowenthal said scornfully, 'they'd doubtless blame that on the Wanambi's foul temper.'
Fedorenko pounced. 'And in a sense they'd be correct. The meteorological disruption is due entirely to our interference with the Vault. But I imagine they'd be more discriminating than that. Bill, despite what you say about human auras, you might find one fact peculiarly suggestive. If the wanambi is angered, it's said to appear as a rainbow before it kills the offender.'
Incredulously, Bill said: 'You think the wanambi is an alien, still alive after all these millions of years? And the survey probes ... woke it up?'
'Perhaps it has been awake all along.'
'We can't take any chances,' Chandler told him. 'There are strong arguments indicating that the wanambi is a representation of a living interstellar alien. If it is, we've aroused it. And it's not likely to be friendly.'
'For Christ's sake,' Lowenthal said in fury. 'Colonel, you've got Russians sleeping in the next room so now you need monsters under the bed.' He splayed out fingers. 'One. Elements of Selene Alpha are still functioning after 25 million years on the moon. Two. The Vault has been totally sealed up for at least that long, in far better shape. Three. Its activity to date bears all the hallmarks of automatic defensive equipment and nothing more. Four. The teleport gate is deadly, gives off pretty colours like a rainbow, and has aboriginal KEEP OUT signs all over it. Five. The boy you're all pinning your absurd hypothesis on is clinically retarded, insane, and no doubt regurgitating chunks of information he's picked up over the years and recorded eidetically. Six. The answer's inside the fucking Vault, and if we get off our asses and develop a working shield to get us in there we can flush all this crap out where it belongs.'
Mildly, Bill said: 'Why can't you go into the Vault? All I know so far is that it destroys electromagnetic fields. Surely the human EM output can't be powerful enough to trigger it off or you'd never have got your tunnel dug.'
'It's a bad place,' Alf Dean said. His face was suddenly beaded with sweat. 'If Mouse hadn't got me out I'd be dead.'
Fedorenko told him: 'The Vault does -- something -- to men who go into it. It hurts their bodies and it wrecks their minds. Alf is the only one so far who has recovered after deep penetration of the Zone. At the fringes it's not impossible. Close to the Vault, it drives them irretrievably insane. They don't all die. There's not a mark on them.' He struggled for further words, and failed to find them.
'The Wanambi zapped them?'
'Or maybe the laws of space and time are different inside that place. Perhaps they saw the _Ding an sich_ unclad by the categories of perception we impose. Cameras don't work in there. The Vault does something to the chemistry of film emulsions.'
Bill stared around the room, from man to man. They met his gaze in silence, faces cold and pale. Apprehension began to worm in his belly. He sought to deny it, reached numbly for objections.
'Harris is right. Nothing could live that long.'
'Perhaps the Rainbow Serpent is an intelligent computer,' Yesileyev said quietly, 'perfectly preserved until now by the Vault's force shields.'