"Mount Charity by Edgar Pangborn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 7)

However, we have found no others. The hope of doing so has not quite gone, but it is faint. Yours is a huge world. Only men stultified by impatience or indifference believe it to be small. Only the pitiably ignorant believe it has been explored.

I'll tell you more of that first awareness. I came to it as mind without speech or knowledge or memory, in possession of an airy body that could fly without learning the art, see and hear keenly, discover the racing pleasures of the wind. With smell, hunger woke (nothing like a hawk's) and I pecked at leaves, drawn by this or that pungent scent, until I learned how hunger could be qui
eted. But though my mind was empty and waiting, it was charged by a flame of curiosity like that of no other animal, I now understand, except man. With no language, tradition or guide, no concept of communication, I watched the continuous wonderful flow of life about me, and I was able to make comparisons, elementary deductions; to move from small observations to large, combine them, and forget nothing. I don't know how long I lived in this beginning way. Only a few years, I think. I was teaching my mind to do what my body could do without teaching: to fly.

Though I saw the roundness of the world and the invitation of distances, I did not, during this time, fly beyond the Pyrenees, nor very far out over the oceans. Short distances above northern Africa, yes-how green it was then!-but I always returned. I think I knew I would move on, but first I needed to understand more of this region where my conscious existence began.

I witnessed. endless killing of life by life. It made me timid, showing me an image of death as motion-all-gone, followed usually by engulfment in some hungry mouth, or decay. I found that most creatures of my own size or smaller' sheered away from me, the hawks as scared as any of the others. My scent, I suppose, or else something they feel by perceptions that have eluded your studies so far, Doctor. Does my scent offend you?

No. Musky and strange. But to me, pleasant.

Good. Mosquitoes were bothering you a while ago. You won't notice any while I stay here.

One day-I was still very young, if that is the right word-I was flying above those northern hills, and I saw Lykos crossing a ridge where the snow was lying thinly. Beside him walked Hanuman. This I knew to be altogether out of the pattern. Wolves I had watched, fierce predators; monkeys were animals of the warm southern part, never in these hills and certainly never in the company of a great black wolf. As I slid by and returned in wonder, Lykos' golden eyes were moving to follow my flight, and with a loving arm over his back crouched Hanuman. Then the monkey stood up, swinging an arm out and in as I had seen human beings

do to summon others. I swooped lower still, overcoming fright. No wolf or monkey smell, but my own!--the leaf-mold smell that I encountered when I cleaned my feathers or slipped my head under my wing. I lit beside them unafraid, and little Ophis slid down from her easy riding place in the deep fur of Lykos' neck. We were four.

The three were already well advanced in a private language that we still speak among ourselves. We acquired human languages later on, as we needed them. (The story of their growth from what they were three thousand years ago is one of the treasures already saved for you in that record of Hanuman's.) I picked up this one of ours in a few days, having already learned love at the moment when Hanuman touched me.

We have no sex. The bodies of Lykos and Hanuman are in the male design but without sexual desire, which we can understand only as observers; Ophis was in the female pattern. A matter of chance: we suppose the drifting dust entered whatever nearby host would admit it. I don't know which sex my body was before it was changed, and it's no matter. If we reproduce by spores, possibly (I am now only dreaming aloud)-possibly if we can die of old age, our bodies may dry and scatter the germs of our substance on the air? Does the thought frighten you?

No, Peregrine.

We know love in terms of devotion, or shared experience and compassion (in this sense we can love your breed, and we do) and of pleasure in nearness, of the sometimes wordless touching of self by self. Our bodies to you would seem cold; we are warm to one another .... Can you imagine a human being standing in the room where my body was becoming a living dust?

1 can imagine it without distress.

Can you image yourself standing there? .

That is harder.

I myself would not wish it. Human beings should live. I think my natural time of dying is still far off. When it comes, perhaps some human invalid, someone who would otherwise die-but it hardly y
matters. If our substance entered, only the frame, the outward image, would remain human. Human beings must live as human beings.

It is your world. You cannot be as we are, nor we as varied and adaptable and adventurous, beautiful, even happy, as your people might become if you will learn how to live; if you will start thinking of fewer and better, not of more and greedier. I think we ought to live too, a few of us, if it is possible, if we are certain our substance can be kept harmless to the natural life of Earth. But as we do not have your potential for evil, neither have we, to the full, your potential for good. It is you who must become the Earth people if you can-the good husbandmen, the music makers and keepers of the vineyard.

Our great journeys began soon after that meeting on the mountainside. We crossed the Pyrenees, in the spring of a year in what you call the ninth century B.C. We traveled as we pleased through the forests that were later Gaul, along the northern coast of Europe, the shores of the Baltic, into the vast body of Asia. Years, and we reached the Pacific. I flew far up and down the coasts, seeing the roofs, smoke, fields of a civilization already stupendous. At that time we did not pause to learn much of it, because we wanted to know the world as a single vision. I found that region of fog where the greatest of oceans narrows to a strait dividing the continents, and I led my friends the long way there. Hanuman, with the aid of Lykos, contrived a raft. We waited till winter narrowed the strait to fewer miles, and crossed, aided as well as threatened by the fierce current and the pack ice. Part of the time Lykos swam, pulling the raft.

He was in no danger of sinking. We can endure a degree of cold that would be lethal to you, and our flesh is much more light and buoyant than yours. But we do fear the ocean, having had no way to learn enough about it. That day it seemed all menace and obscurity. I hoped as I flew that I could warn them of an ugly fin approaching, or shape rising out of the gray confusion-but that fog, that everlasting fog! Concealing us helpfully, yes, but making

my sharp eyes useless. Well, we came through, and later returned safely. As a company we made that journey only one more time. To me, of course, ocean barriers are less than the divisions of a chessboard.
On that journey-already into the eighth century B.C. in your terms-we explored the entire coast of North America, across the north to Newfoundland, south to what you have made the Canal Zone, down to the Horn with many years of learning a new jungle, northward over the Andes, again Alaska. Decades later, back near our place of origin.

We studied most of the human settlements and cultures that we found, avoiding contact because we knew the dangers. In those centuries of our exploration we never appeared as more than a quick shadow at the corner of a human eye, a dot of wings circling in and out of the clouds.

Remember, Doctor: three thousand years is no great age. Before our minds awoke, Mohenjo-Daro had been buried and forgotten under a welter of later building. Great Agade of Babylonia was founded more than a thousand years before our waking-but we knew that city, in our time. Ophis in its cellars, Hanuman a fleeting shadow on midnight roofs. Lykos strolled its stinking alleys in the dark, listening to human voices, and the dogs cringed away unharmed.

Greece we knew, her few enlightened centuries. I have flown over Crete, over all the Grecian islands. We can say to you, Helen was indeed beautiful; the heart of Achilles did break at the death of his friend. I saw the burning of Troy town black on the sky only one of the thousand wars we witnessed, all of them foul, vain and unnecessary. That one matters only because a poet made music. Yes, Odysseus of the many devices did set out from there on his homeward journey-but of that I know, as you do, only what is told by a better voice.

In a much later journey we passed by Antioch and Tyre, then on as far as a massive human disturbance-Alexandria, where we heard familiar Greek and Roman dialects. We followed the coast