"Foster, Alan Dean - Humanx 3 - Nor Crystal Tears" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

chamber of controlled commotion and considerable noise. Beneath the gently
arched ceiling, adults conversed with his fellow larvae. With awareness of his
surroundings came recognition of self and of body: a lumpish,
meter-and-a-half-long cylindrical mass of mottled white flesh.
Through simple, incomplete larval eyes he hungrily abнsorbed the limited world.
Adults, equipment, walls and ceiling and floor, his companions, the cradle he
lay in, all were white and black and in-between shades of gray. They were all he
could perceive. Color was a mysterious, unimagнinable realm to which only adults
had access. Of all the unknowns of existence, he most pondered what was blue,
what was yellow-the taste of the withheld spectrum.
The adults who managed the Nursery and attended the young were experienced in
that service. They'd heard generations of youngsters ask the same questions in
the same order over and over, yet they were- ever patient and polite. So they
tried their best to explain color to him. The words had no meaning because there
were no possible reference points, no mental landmarks to which a larva could
relate. It was like trying to describe the sun that warmed the surнface high,
high above the subterranean Nursery. He came to think of the sun as a brightly
blazing something that produced an intense absence of dark.
As he grew the attendants let him move about in his crude humping, wormlike
fashion. Nurses bustled through the Nursery, busy adults gifted with real
mobility. Teachнing machines murmured their endless litany to the stuнdious.
Other adults occasionally came to visit, including a pair who identified
themselves as his own parents.
He compared them with his companions, like himself squirming white masses ending
in dull black eyes and thin mouth-slits. How he envied the adults their clean
lines and mature bodies, the four strong legs, the footarms above serving either
as hands or as a third pair of legs, the deliнcate truhands above them.
They had real eyes, adults did. Great multifaceted comнpound orbs that shone
like a cluster of bright jewels (light gray to him, though he knew they were
orange and red and gold, whatever those were). These were set to the sides of
the shining valentine-shaped heads, from which a pair of feathery antennae
sprouted, honestly white. He was fasciнnated by the antennae, as all his
companions were. The adults would explain that two senses were held there, the
sense of smell and the sense of faz.
He understood fazzing, the ability to detect the presence of moving objects by
sensing the disruption of air. But the concept of smell utterly eluded him, much
as color did. Along with arms and legs, then, he desperately wished for
antennae. He desperately wished to be complete.
The Nurses were patient, fully understanding such yearnнings. Antennae and limbs
would come with time. Meanнwhile there was much to learn.
They taught speech, though larvae were capable of no more than a crude wheezing
and gasping through their flexнible mouth-parts. It took hard mandibles and
adult lungs and throats to produce the elegant clicks and whistles of mature
communication.
So he could see after a fashion, and hear, and speak a little. But sight was
incomplete without color and he could not faz or smell at all. By way of
compensation the teachers explained that no adult could faz or smell nearly as
well as the primitive ancestors of the Thranx, back when the race dwelt in
unintelligence even deeper in the bowels of the earth than they did now, when
artificial light did not exist, and the senses of faz and smell necessarily