"Charles L. Harness - The Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

"Such as?"

"Eventual telemusical communication of all thought. The encephalograph, you know, looks oddly like a
musical sound track. Oh, we can't expect to convert overnight to communication of pure thought by pure
music. Naturally, crude transitional forms will intervene. But any type of direct idea transmission that
involves the sending and receiving of rhythm and modulation as such is a cut higher than communication in
a verbal medium, and may be a rudimentary step upward toward true musical communion, just as dawn
man presaged true words with allusive, onomatopoeic monosyllables."
"There's your answer, then," said Anna. "Why should Ruy Jacques trouble to read, when every bit of
metal around him is an open book?" She continued speculatively, "You might look at it this way. Our
ancestors forgot how to swing through the trees when they learned how to walk erect. Their history is
recapitulated in our very young. Almost immediately after birth, a human infant can hang by his hands,
ape-like. And then, after a week or so, he forgets what no human infant ever really needed to know. So
now Ruy forgets how to read. A great pity. Perhaps. But if the world were peopled with Ruys, they
wouldn't need to know how, for after the first few years of infancy, they'd learn to use their
metal-empathic sense. They might even say, 'It's all very nice to be able to read and write and swing
about in trees when you're quite young, but after all, one matures'."

She pressed a button on the desk slide viewer that sat on a table by the artist's bed. "This is a
radiographic slide of Ruy's cerebral hemispheres as viewed from above, probably old stuff to you. It
shows that the 'horns' are not mere localized growths in the prefrontal area, but extend as slender tracts
around the respective hemispheric peripheries to the visuo-sensory area of the occipital lobes, where they
turn and enter the cerebral interior, there to merge in an enlarged ball-like juncture at a point over the
cerebellum where the pineal 'eye' is ordinarily found."

"But the pineal is completely missing in the slide," demurred Bell.

"That's the question," countered Anna. "Is the pineal absentтАФor, are the 'horns' actually the pineal,
enormously enlarged and bifurcated? I'm convinced that the latter is the fact. For reasons presently
unknown to me, this heretofore small, obscure lobe has grown, bifurcated, and forced its destructive dual
limbs not only through the soft cerebral tissue concerned with the ability to read, but also has gone on to
skirt half the cerebral circumference to the forehead, where even the hard frontal bone of the skull has
softened under its pressure." She looked at Bell closely. "I infer that it's just a question of time before I,
too, forget how to read and write."

Bell's eyes drifted evasively to the immobile face of the unconscious artist. "But the number of neurons in
a given mammalian brain remains constant after birth," he said. "These cells can throw out numerous
dendrites and create increasingly complex neural patterns as the subject grows older, but he can't grow
any more of the primary neurons."

"I know. That's the trouble. Ruy can't grow more brain, but he has." She touched her own 'horns'
wonderingly. "And I guess I have, too. WhatтАФ?"

Following Bell's glance, she bent over to inspect the artist's face, and started as from a physical blow.

Eyes like anguished talons were clutching hers.

His lips moved, and a harsh whisper swirled about her ears like a desolate wind: "...The Nightingale...in
death...greater beauty unbearable...but watch...THE ROSE!"