"Ken MacLeod - A Case of Consilience" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

"Dismissed."

I do not what I wish I did.

It was a lot to read into a sequence of successive concentrations of different organic molecules. In the
raw transcript it went like this:

Titration Translation
Indication-marker THIS
Impulse-summation MYCOID
Action (general) DOES
Negation-marker NOT
Impulse-direction ACT
Affirmation-marker [AS] INTENDED [BY]
Impulse-summation [THIS] MYCOID
Repulsion-marker [AND THIS] DISGUST[S]
Impulse-summation [THIS] MYCOID

Donald looked at the print-out and trembled. It was hard not to see it as the first evidence of an alien that
knew sin. He well realized, of course, that it could just as well mean something as innocent as / couldn't
help but puke. But the temptation, if it was a temptation, to read it as an instance of the spirit warring

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 MacLeod, Ken - A Case of Consilience


against the fleshтАФwell, against the slimeтАФ was almost irresistible. Donald couldn't help but regard it as
a case of consilience, and as no coincidence.

"Is there any way we can respond to this?"

Trepper, the mycoid project team leader, shook his head. "It's very difficult to reproduce the gradients.
For us, it's as ifтАж Look, suppose a tree could understand human speech. It tries to respond by growing
some twigs and branches so that they rub against each other just so, in the wind. And all we hear are
some funny scratching and creaking sounds."

Trees in the wind. Donald gazed past the tables and equipment of the corridor's field lab to the portal
that opened on to the mycoids' planet. The view showed a few standing trees, and a lot of fallen logs.
The mycoids did something to force the trees' growth and weaken their structure, giving the vast
underground mycoid colonies plenty of rotting cellulose to feed on. Far in the distance, across a plain of
coppery grass, rose a copse of quite different trees, tall and stately with tapered bulges from the roots to
half-way up the trunks. Vane-like projections of stiff leaves sprouted from their sides. Bare branches
bristled at their tops. These were the Niven Pines, able to synthesize and store megaliters of volatile and
flammable hydrocarbons. At every lightning storm one or other of these treesтАФthe spark carried by
some kind of liquid lightning conductor to a drip of fuel-sap at its footтАФwould roar into flame and rise
skyward. Some of them would make it to orbit. No doubt they bore mycoid travelers, but what these
clammy astronauts did in space, and whether this improbable arboreal rocketry was the result of natural
selection, or of conscious genetic manipulation by the mycoidsтАФor indeed some other alienтАФwas as yet
unclear.