"Samuel R. Delany - The Star Pit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

THE STAR PIT
Samuel R. Delany



Two glass panes with dirt between and little tunnels from cell to cell: when I was a kid I had an ant
colony.

But once some of our four-to-six-year-olds built an ecologarium with six-foot plastic panels and grooved
aluminum bars to hold corners and top down. They put it out on the sand.

There was a mud puddle against one wall so you could see what was going on underwater. Sometimes
segment worms crawling through the reddish earth hit the side so their tunnels were visible for a few
inches. In hot weather the inside of the plastic got coated with mist and droplets. The small round leaves
on the litmus vines changed from blue to pink, blue to pink as clouds coursed the sky and the pH of the
photosensitive soil shifted slightly.

The kids would run out before dawn and belly down naked in the cool sand with their chins on the backs
of their hands and stare in the half-dark till the red mill wheel of Sigma lifted over the bloody sea. The
sand was maroon then, and the flowers of the crystal plants looked like rubies in the dim light of the giant
sun. Up the beach the jungle would begin to whisper while somewhere an aniwort would start warbling.
The kids would giggle and poke each other and crowd closer.

Then Sigma-prime, the second member of the binary, would flare like thermite on the water, and crimson
clouds would bleach from coral, through peach, to foam. The kids, half on top of each other now, lay like
a pile of copper ingots with sun streaks in their hairтАФeven on little Antoni, my oldest, whose hair was
black and curly like bubbling oil (like his mother's), the down on the small of his two-year-old back was
a white haze across the copper if you looked that close to see.

More children came to squat and lean on their knees, or kneel with their noses an inch from the walls, to
watch, like young magicians, as things were born, grew, matured, and other things were born. Enchanted
at their own construction, they stared at the miracles in their live museum.

A small, red seed lay camouflaged in the silt by the lake/puddle. One evening as white Sigma-prime left
the sky violet, it broke open into a brown larva as long and of the same color as the first joint of Antoni's
thumb. It flipped and swirled in the mud a couple of days, then crawled to the first branch of the nearest
crystal plant to hang exhausted, head down, from the tip. The brown flesh hardened, thickened, grew
black, shiny. Then one morning the children saw the onyx chrysalis crack, and by second dawn there was
an emerald-eyed flying lizard buzzing at the plastic panels.

"Oh, look, Da!" they called to me. "It's trying to get out!" The speed-hazed creature butted at the corner
for a few days, then settled at last to crawling around the broad leaves of the miniature shade palms.

When the season grew cool and there was the annual debate over whether the kids should put tunics
onтАФthey never stayed in them more than twenty minutes anywayтАФthe jewels of the crystal plant misted,
their facets coarsened, and they fell like gravel.

There were little four-cupped sloths, too, big as a six-year-old's fist. Most of the time they pressed their
velvety bodies against the walls and stared longingly across the sand with their retractable eye-clusters.
Then two of them swelled for about three weeks. We thought at first it was some bloating infection. But