"Terry Dowling - The Lagan Fishers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dowling Terry)

Sam kept at it. "Looted elsewhere?"
Howard watched him for a few moments. "Hadn't thought of that. Looted on the other side. You better
watch 'im, Cat. Sounds like we got ourselves a new rocket scientist."
Howard knew well enough to take up a sample bag then and set off for the hedges.

By the end of the fifth week, their four major branchings had become seven, and what started as an ordinary
watchtower lofting on one of them swelled, brachiated and buttressed first into a classic "salisbury point,"
then-over another twenty days-a full-blown "chartres crown," finally a true "notre dame." It meant endless
media fly-bys, countless tek visits, even more busloads of tourists and school groups, but so few blooms
became cathedral that Sam couldn't blame them. It was the appropriate response. He would have been
worried if there hadn't been the extra attention, though it made it harder to live with what his world was
becoming. Having the lagan was one thing; now it was becoming too strikingly alien.
Again it was genial, friendly Howard who triggered the next outburst, dumping his bag on the sorting table,
then coming over to stand with his newfound friend to admire the towering structure.
"How about it, Sam? A cathedral. Makes you believe in the mirroring, don't it?"
"What's that, Howie?" The word mirror often caught him like that. The Tilby Tiger lived in a house without
mirrors. (But full of reflections, he sometimes quipped on better days, making the tired old joke.)
"The online spiel. That it's mimicry. Skeuomorphism. The lagan sees clouds; it tries to make clouds.
Sees trees and roads, does its best to give trees and roads."
"You believe that?"
Howard shrugged. "Makes sense. Has a certain appeal. This stuff pushes through, looks around, imitates
what it sees."
"Sees! Sees! Sees! Where the hell has my bloom seen a cathedral, Howard, tell me that!"
 Again Howard shrugged. "Dunno. It goes into the sky; it blows in the air; it feels the sun and gets in
among the flowers. Maybe ancient cathedrals were just imitations of high places too. Maybe other lagan
blooms have seen cathedrals and pass on the knowledge. Anyway, Sam, I figure why resist what's as natural
as what nature's already doin'. Why resist it? Why do you?"
Because, Sam wanted to say. Just because. Then, needing reasons, needing reason, gave himself:
There's my face, there's the other MF impairment, my infertility, there's Jeanie lost (not MF-related, no, but
more old sayings covered it: "collateral damage," "friendly fire"). This is too new, too fast, too
change-everything insistent. For someone keeping someone lost as alive as possible in what had been,
simply been for them-views, routines, sugars in coffee, favorite songs, the spending of days, the very form
and nature of days-how dare this brutal new lagan change it so. As Jeanie-bright, as Jeanie-fresh as Sam
tried to make it, the lagan more than anything was always saying that time has gone. Jeanie is gone. Let
them go.
Sam found himself trying so hard. Jeanie would have loved the lagan, arranged picnics, invited friends.
Jeanie would have liked Howard and the others getting together, liked the little-kid thrill of them bringing in the
bounty-grown-ups acting like kids acting like grown-ups.
But try as he might, Sam always found himself on both sides of it, and his words kept coming out a bit
crazy. He couldn't help himself.
"Look at what's happened. First the MF outbreak in '29, then the lagan five years later."
"They're not related," Howard said. "It's not cause and effect."
"Maybe. Experts in nineteenth century London didn't see the connection between smog and tuberculosis
either."
"Between what and what?"
Sam was careful not to smile. For all his smarts, Howard was an aging child of the times, a true citizen of
the age, lots of compartmentalized knowledge, but no true overview. He knew all about shipwrecks and 1930s
Hudson locomotives and Napoleon Bonaparte and vintage CD-ROM games, but lacked the larger cultural
horizon for such things. For him the old term PC still meant "Politically Correct" not "Pre-Copernican," though
who remembered Copernicus these days, or Giordano Bruno, or William Tyndale, or the Library at Alexandria