"Samuel R. Delany - High Weir" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

High Weir
by Samuel R. Delany
I
"What do you know!" Smith, from the top of the ladder.

"What is it?" Jones, at the bottom.

And Rimkin thought desperately: Boiled potatoes! My God, boiled potatoes! If I took
toothpicks and stuck them in boiled potatoes, then stuck one on top of the other,
made heads, arms, legsтАФlike little snowmenтАФthey would look just like these men in
spacesuits on Mars.

"Concaved!" Smith called down. "You know those religious pictures they used to
have back home, in the little store windows, where the eyes followed you down the
street? The faces were carved in reverse relief like this."

"Those faces aren't carved in reverse relief!" Mak, right next to Rimkin, shouted up.
"I can see that from here."

"Not the whole face," Smith said. "Just the eyes. That's why they had that funny
effect when we were coming across the sand."

Mak, Rimkin thought. Mak. Mak. What distinguishes that man besides the k in his
name?

"They are handsome up there." That from Hodges. "A whole year of speculation
over whether those little bits of purple stone were carved or naturalтАФand suddenly
here it all is, right on High Weir. The answer. Look at it: It means intelligence. It
means culture. It means an advanced culture at least on the level of the ancient
Greeks, too. Do you realize the spaces between these temple columns lead to a
whole new branch of anthropology?"

"We don't know that this thing's a temple," Mak grunted.

"A whole new complex of studies!" Hodges reiterated. "We're all of us Sir Arthur
Evanses unearthing the great staircase at Knossos. We're Schliemanns digging up
the treasures of Atreus."

I don't know where any of them are, Rimkin thought. Their voices come through the
rubber-ringed grills inside my helmet. All these boiled-potato figures against the
grainy rust; that one there, who I think is Hodges; the sun blinds out the faceplate.
And for all I know, behind the plastic is a grotesquerie as deformed as those domed
heads along the architrave above us.тАж

"Hey, Rimkin, you're the linguist. Why aren't you poking around for something that
looks like writing?"

"Huh тАж?" And as he said it, without hearing their laughter, he knew that inside their
onion helmets they were smiling and shaking their heads. Jones said: