"James Patrick Kelly - Ninety Percent of Everything" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

"Ice cream?" he said.
He had a Strawbetty Billy Bar and I had a Chuncolate Charley Cone. The
van pulled out of the parking lot and I could hear its synthesizer chirp the
first four measures of Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" over and over again.
"Wait a minute!" I said. "I've got responsibilities. Classes. A meeting
to sleep through."
"I love ice cream." Ramsdel Wetherall licked a Strawbetty smear from
the corner of his mouth. "It's all I eat these days. Of course, it has to be
properly fortified and nutritionally balanced, but that's why I bought Jolly
Freeze in the first place. You've seen jewels up close, right? At the Eastline
site?"
I made myself sit back in the chair. "Sure," I said. "I've even seen
them die."
****
When the shitdogs ate their ship, nobody tried to stop them. At that point it
was assumed that they were intelligent. They must have perfectly good, if
completely alien, reasons for eating their ship. And of course, there was also
the problem of the big stink, which kept even the toughest Marine at a
considerable distance.
With the landers gone, we had no clue as to the origin of the shitdogs
or the purpose for which they were sent to earth -- other than the beasts
themselves.
Most of my colleagues agreed that the shitdogs were beasts; the
stubborn few who contended that we hadn't yet recognized their intelligence
because it was so different from our own were trapped in a circular argument.
As had been reported any number of times, the shitdogs were not dogs
nor were their castings shit -- strictly speaking. From direct observation we
could see that they were quadrupeds, ranging in hue from powder blue to near
indigo. We estimated they weighed almost 3000 kilograms. The largest was
fifteen meters in length; none were shorter than fourteen. They functioned
without difficulty in earth's gravity. Their forelegs were long and
particularly well suited to digging. Each of their three toes culminated in a
razor-sharp crystalline claw, hard enough to scratch diamond. They used their
short, powerful rear legs to propel them as they burrowed through salt flats
and the piles of their castings. Their faces were composed of a circular maw
which could dilate to as much as a meter and a half in diameter. Above that
were two external organs the size of tennis balls -- eyes, we supposed. An
orifice just above the rear legs could iris completely shut, or open to eject
a continuous casting approximately twenty-five centimeters in diameter.
We'd been observing shitdog behavior for six years. It consisted mostly
of eating and excreting -- or intake and output, depending on your model.
There was no way to tell whether they were natural or created; it was entirely
possible they were some kind of organic mechanisms. In any event, they
tunneled through the salt flats, gorging on a variety of materials, pushing
others aside. When they emerged, usually after a period of eight to ten days,
their bodies were grotesquely distended. They lay pulsing and inert in the
fierce desert sun, digesting -- or processing -- for as long as a month.
During this time, they periodically vented small amounts of chlorine gas. At
the end of this rest cycle, they would crawl to the casting deposit area,
climb or tunnel to an appropriate spot, and release their casting in such a