"Delany, Samuel R - The Einstein Intersection 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

"Hey, did anybody see Le Dorik around here? Odd thing to run off-"

Then I saw this expression cracking through Little Jon's miniature features like faults in black rock. "Le Dorik's dead," Little Jon said; "that's what they wanted to tell you."
"Huh?"
"Before sunup, just inside the kage," Easy said. "He was lying by the grave for my brother, Whitey. Remember my brother-"
"Yeah, yeah," I said. "I helped dig it-Before sunup? That's impossible. The sun was up when we went to sleep, right here." Then I said, "Dead?"
Little Jon nodded. "Like Friza. The same way. That's what La Dire said."
I stood up, holding my blade tight. "But that's impossible! " Somebody saying, Wait till it gets light enough so you'll know I'm here. "Le Dorik was with me after sunrise. That's when we lay down here to sleep."
"You slept with Le Dorik after Le Dorik was dead?" Nativia asked, wonderingly.
Bewildered, I returned to the village. La Dire and Lo Hawk met me at the source-cave. We spoke together a bit; I watched them thinking deeply about things I didn't understand, about my bewilderment.
"You're a good hunter, Lo Lobey," Lo Hawk said at last, "and though a bit outsized below the waist, a fair specimen of a man. You have much danger ahead of you; I've taught you much. Remember it when you wander by the rim of night or the edge of morning." Apparently Le Dorik's death had convinced him there was something to La Dire's suppositions, though I understood neither side of the argument nor the bridge between. They didn't enlighten me. "Use what I have taught you to get where you are going," Lo Hawk went on, "to survive your stay, and make your way back."
"You are different." This is what La Dire said. "You have seen it is dangerous to be so. It is also very important. I have tried to instruct you in a view of the world large enough to encompass the deeds you will do as well as their significance. You have learned much, Lo Lobey. Use what I have taught you too."
With no idea where I was going, I turned and staggered away, still dazed by Dorik's death before sunrise. Apparently the Bloi triplets had been up all night fishing for blind-crabs in the mouth of the source-cave stream. They'd come back while it was still dark, swinging their hand-beams and joking as they walked up from the river- Dorik behind the wire in a net of shadow, circled with their lights, face down at the grave's edge! It must have been just moments after I first left.
I wheeled through the brambles, heading towards the noon, with one thought clearing, as figures on a stream bed clear when you brush back the bubbles a moment: if Le Dorik, dead, had walked with me a while ("I'm showing you now, Lobey."), walked through dawn and gorse, curled on a stone under new sunlight, then Friza too could travel with me. If I could find what killed those of us who were different, but whose difference gave us a reality beyond dying-
A slow song now on my blade to mourn Dorik; and the beat of my feet on earth in journey. After a few hours of such mourning, the heat had polished me with sweat as in some funeral dance.
While day leaned over the hills I passed the first red flowers, blossoms big as my face, like blood bubbles nested

in thorns, often resting on the bare rock. No good to stop here. Carnivorous.
I squatted on a broken seat of granite in the yellowing afternoon. A snail the size of my curled forefinger doffed his eyes at a puddle big as my palm. Half an hour later, climbing down a canyon wall when yellow had died under violet I saw a tear in the rock: another opening into the source-cave. I decided on nighting it there, and ducked in.
Still smells of humans and death. Which is good. Dangerous animals avoid it. I stalked inside, padding on all fours. Loose earth became moss, became cement underfoot. Outside, night, sonic lace of crickets and whining wasps I would not make on my knife, was well into black development.
Soon I touched a metal track, turned, and followed it with my hands . . . over a place where dirt had fallen, across a scattering of twigs and leaves, then down a long slope. I was about to stop, roll against the cave wall where it was drier, and sleep, when the track split.
I stood up.
When I shrilled on my blade, a long echo came from the right: endless passage there. But only a stubby resonance from the left: some sort of chamber. I walked left. My hip brushed a door jamb.

Then a room glowed suddenly before me. The sensor circuits were still sensitive. Grilled walls, blue glass desk, brass light fixtures, cabinets, and a television screen set in the wall. Squinting in the new light I walked over. When they still work, the colors are nice to watch: they make patterns and the patterns make music in me. Several people who had gone exploring the source-cave had told me about them (night fire and freakishly interested children knotted around the flame and the adventurer) and I'd gone to see one in a well explored arm two years back. Which is how I learned about the music.
Color television is certainly a lot more fun than this terribly risky genetic method of reproduction we've taken over. Ah well. It's a lovely world.
I sat on the desk and tried knobs till one clicked. The screen grayed at me, flickered, streamed with colors.
There was static, so I found the volume knob and turned it down ... so I could hear the music in colors. Just as I raised my blade to my mouth, something happened.
Laughter.
First I thought it was melody. But it was a voice laughing. And on the screen, in chaotic shimmerings, a face. It wasn't a picture of a face. It was as if I was just looking at the particular dots of melody-hue that formed the face, ignoring the rest. I would have seen those features on any visual riot: Friza's face.
The voice was someone else's.
Friza dissolved. Another face replaced hers: Dorik's. The strange laughter again. Suddenly there was Friza on one side of the screen, and Dorik on the other. Centered: the boy who was laughing at me. The picture cleared, filled, and I lost the rest of the room. Behind him, crumbled streets, beams jutting from the wrecks of walls, weeds writhing; and all lit with flickering green, the sun white on the reticulated sky. On a lamp-post behind him perched a creature with fins and white gills, scraping one red foot on the rust. On the curb was a hydrant laced with light and verdigris.
The boy, a redhead-redder than the Blois, redder than blood gutted blossoms-laughed with downcast eyes. His lashes were gold. Transparent skin caught up the green and fluoresced with it; but I knew that under normal light he would have been as pale as Whitey dying.
"Lobey," in the laughter, and his lips uncurtained small teeth-many too many of them. Like the shark's mouth, maybe, I'd seen in La Dire's book, rank on rank of ivory needles. "Lobey, how you gonna find me, huh?"
"What. . .?" and expected the illusion to end with my voice.
But somewhere that naked, laughing boy still stood with one foot in the gutter filled with waving weeds. Only Friza and Dorik were gone.
"Where are you?"
He looked up and his eyes had no whites, only glittering gold and brown. I'd seen a few like that before, eyes. Unnerving, still, to look at a dog's eyes in a human face. "My mother called me Bonny William. Now they all call me Kid Death." He sat on the curb, hanging his hands over his knees. "You're gonna find me, Lobey, kill me like I killed Friza and Dorik?"
"You? You, Lo Bonny William-"
"Not Lo. Kid Death. Not Lo Kid."
"You killed them? But... why?" Despair unvoiced my words to whispers.
"Because they were different. And I am more different than any of you. You scare me, and when I'm frightened" -laughing again-"I kill." He blinked. "You're not looking for me, you know. I'm looking for you."
"What do you mean?"
He shook shocked crimson from his white brow. "I'm bringing you down here to me. If I didn't want you, you'd

never find me. Because I do want you, there's no way you can avoid me. I can see through the eyes of anyone on this world, on any world where our ancestors have ever been: so I know a lot about many things I've never touched or smelled. You've started out not knowing where I am and running towards me. You'll end, Lo Lobey"-he raised his head-"fleeing my green home, scrabbling on the sand like a blind goat trying to keep footing at a chimney edge-"
"-how do you know about-"
"-you'll fall and break your neck." He shook a finger at me, clawed like Little Jon's. "Come to me, Lo Lobey."
"If I find you, will you give me back Friza?"
"I've already given you back Le Dorik for a little while."