"Frank Herbert - The Featherbedders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

I am Sumctroxelunsmeg, he reminded himself. I am a Slorin of seven syllables, each
addition to my name an honor to my family. By the pupa of my jelly-sire whose name took
fourteen thousand heartbeats to pronounce, I shall not fail!
There! That was the spirit he needed - the eternal wanderer, temporarily disciplined, yet
without boundaries. 'If you want to swim, you must enter the water,' he whispered.


'Did you say something, Dad?' Rick asked.
Ahhh, that was very good, Smeg thought. Dad - the easy colloquialism.
'I was girding myself for the ordeal, so to speak,' Smeg said. 'We must separate in a few
minutes.' He nodded ahead to where a town was beginning to hump itself out of the horizon.
'I think I should barge right in and start asking about their sheriff,' Rick said.
Smeg drew in a sharp breath, a gesture of surprise that fitted this body. 'Feel out the
situation first,' he said.
More and more, he began to question the wisdom of sending Rick in there. Dangerous,
damnably dangerous. Rick could get himself irrevocably killed, ruined beyond the pupa's powers
to restore. Worse than that, he could be exposed. There was the real danger. Give natives
the knowledge of what they were fighting and they tended to develop extremely effective
methods.
Slorin memory carried a bagful of horror stories to verify this fact.
'The Slorin must remain ready to take any shape, adapt to any situation,' Rick said. 'That
it!'
Rick spoke the axiom well, Smeg thought, but did he really understand it? How could he?
Rick still didn't have full control of the behavior patterns that went with this particular body
shape. Again, Smeg sighed. If only they'd saved the infiltration squad, the expendable
specialists.
Thoughts such as this always brought the more disquieting question: Saved them from
what?
There had been five hundred pupae in the Scattership before the unknown disaster. Now
there were four secondary ancestors and one new offspring created on this planet. They were
shipless castaways on an unregistered world, not knowing even the nature of the disaster
which had sent them scooting across the void in an escape capsule with minimum shielding.
Four of them had emerged from the capsule as basic Slorin poly-morphs to find themselves
in darkness on a steep landscape of rocks and trees. At morning, there'd been four additional
trees there - watching, listening, weighing the newness against memories accumulated across
a timespan in which billions of planets such as this one could have developed and died.
The capsule had chosen an excellent landing site: no nearby sentient constructions. The
Slorin now knew the region's native label - central British Columbia. In that period of
awakening, though, it had been a place of unknown dangers whose chemistry and organization
required the most cautious testing.
In time, four black bears had shambled down out of the mountains. Approaching civilization,
they'd hidden and watched - listening, always listening, never daring to use the mindcloud.
Who knew what mental powers the natives might have? Four roughly fashioned hunters had
been metamorphosed from Slorin pupae in a brush-screened cave. The hunters had been
tested, refined.
Finally - the hunters had scattered.
Slorin always scattered.


'When we left Washington you said something about the possibility of a trap,' Rick said.