"Foster, Alan Dean - Humanx 5 - Sentenced To Prism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

The cascalarian was an organosdicate structure, as were most of the dominant
lifeforms on Prism, for it was a world based as much on silicon as carbon. A
world of glass, beauty, and confusion.
No matter. Shade was shade, he mused.
Icy turning his head he could look down at the stream. The cool, pure,
fast‑running stream that could save his life, if he could get to it. The stream
was alive with snowнflakes. Twenty of them would fit easily in the palm of his
hand.
Snowflakes had tiny transparent legs which ended in broad fiat pads. Attached to
their backs was a single curved sail about the size of a thumbnail. They
congregated where the water was still, partying on the surface tension. As the
sun rose or fell they adjusted their stance to receive as much of its light as
possible, crowding and shoving each other for the best place. Each
photoreceptive sail was a different metallic color: carmine red, cobalt blue,
deep purple, emerald green. A pair of tiny crystalline eyes marked the location
of each head, and the eyes were colored the same intense hue as their owner's
sail.
Powered by Prism's sun, the creatures dashed silently back and forth across the
water, using tiny vacuuming mouths to suck up the mineral‑rich silicoflagellata
washed down from above. Thoughts of predation began to worry Evan. He was in no
danger from the cascalarian or the brightly colored snowflakes, but he knew that
Prism was home also to creatures which would gladly take him apart. Not for
meat, but for the valuable store of minerals his body contained. The human body
was a mine of highly prized trace elements. So was his suit. A big scavenger
would draw no distinction between man and clothing and would devour both with
equal pleasure.
His body was particularly rich in iron, potassium, and calcium. A mine. My mine
is mine, he thought, too tired to laugh. The sun continued to raise the suit's
internal temperature, despite the cascalarian's shade. He blinked against his
own sweat. He had to do something soon.
No. He had to do something sooner than that, because something was coming toward
him. He was sure his vision wasn't that far gone. Whatever was approaching
wasn't very big, but then, it wouldn't have to be to do some real damage, given
his helpless semicomatose state.
He couldn't see it clearly because the special discrimнinatory visor of his suit
helmet wasn't functioning propнerly. The visor was necessary because many of
Prism's lifeforms were organized according to fractal instead of normal
geometry. They tended to blur if you stared at them for very long, as the human
eye sought patterns and organization where none existed. Fractals existed
someнwhere between the first and second dimension or the secнond and the third.
No one, not even the mathematicians, was quite sure.
It didn't matter so long as you looked through the Hausdorf lenses. They were
built into the visor of his suit helmet. Which was broken. As a result,
fractally orgaнnized figures didn't look quite right when viewed through
unadjusted transparencies. Like the whatever it was that was slowly coming
toward him.
It was more than merely disconcerting. You could go crazy. Fortunately he was
too tired to care. So very tired.
He could feel himself drifting, falling asleep or fainting, he wasn't sure
which. Not that it mattered.