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

"And for that you worship us? I might as well go worshiping bugs that die a
few minutes after they're born."

The alien chuckled, and Willard resented it.

"Is that why you come here? To gloat?"

"What else would we worship, Mr. Crane? While we don't discount the
possibility of invisible gods, we really never have invented any. We never
died, so why dream of immortality? Here we found a people who knew how to
worship, and for the first time we found awakened in us a desire to do
homage to superior beings."

And Willard noticed his heartbeat, realized that it would stop while the
alien had no heart, had nothing that would ever end. "Superior, hell."

"We," said the alien, "remember everything, from the first stirrings of
intellect to the present. When we are 'born,' so to speak, we have no need
of teachers. We have never learned to write-- merely to exchange RNA. We
have never learned to create beauty to outlast our lives because nothing
outlasts our lives. We live to see all our works crumble. Here, Mr. Crane,
we have found a race that builds for the sheer joy of building, that
creates beauty, that writes books, that invents the lives of never-known
people to delight others who know they are being lied to, a race that
devises immortal gods to worship and celebrates its own mortality with
immense pomp and glory. Death is the foundation of all that is great about
humanity, Mr. Crane."

"Like hell it is," said Willard. "I'm about to die, and there's nothing
great about it."

"You don't really believe that, Mr. Crane," the alien said. "None of you
do. Your lives are built around death, glorifying it. Postponing it as long
as possible, to be sure, but glorifying it. In the earliest literature, the
death of the hero is the moment of greatest climax. The most potent myth."

"Those poems weren't written by old men with flabby bodies and hearts that
only beat when they feel like it."

"Nonsense. Everything you do smacks of death. Your poems have beginnings
and endings, and structures that limit the work. Your paintings have edges,
marking off where the beauty begins and ends. Your sculptures isolate a
moment in time. Your music starts and finishes. All that you do is mortal--
it is all born. It all dies. And yet you struggle against mortality and
have overcome it, building up tremendous stores of shared knowledge through
your finite books and your finite words. You put frames on everything."

"Mass insanity, then. But it explains nothing about why you worship. You
must come here to mock us."