"Card, Orson Scott - Cruel Miracles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Card Orson Scott)

"No, Mr. Crane. We've wandered the galaxy for several million years, all
told, meeting new races and renewing acquaintance with old. Evolution is a
tedious old highway-- carbon-based life always leads to certain patterns
and certain forms, despite the fact that we seem hideously different to
you--"

"Not too bad, Mister, a little ugly, but not too bad--"

"All the-- people like us that you've seen-- well, we don't come from the
same planet, though it has been assumed so by your scientists. Actually, we
come from thousands of planets. Separate, independent evolution, leading
inexorably to us. Absolutely, or nearly absolutely, uniform throughout the
galaxy. We are the natural endproduct of evolution."

"So we're the oddballs."

"You might say so. Because somewhere along the line, Mr. Crane, deep in
your past, your planet's evolution went astray from the normal. It created
something utterly new."

"Sex?"

"We all have sex, Mr. Crane. Without it, how in the world could the race
improve? No, what was new on your planet, Mr. Crane, was death."

The word was not an easy one for Willard to hear. His wife had, after all,
meant a great deal to him. And he meant even more to himself. Death already
loomed in dizzy spells and shortened breath and weariness that refused to
turn into sleep.

"Death?"

"We don't die, Mr. Crane. We reproduce by splitting off whole sections of
ourselves with identical DNA-- you know about DNA?"

"I went to college."

"And with us, of course, as with all other life in the universe,
intelligence is carried on the DNA, not in the brain. One of the byproducts
of death, the brain is. We don't have it. We split, and the individual,
complete with all memories, lives on in the children, who are made up of
the actual flesh of my flesh, you see? I will never die."

"Well, bully for you," Willard said, feeling strangely cheated, and
wondering why he hadn't guessed.

"And so we came here and found people whose life had a finish; who began as
unformed creatures without memory and, after an incredibly brief span,
died."