"Pohl, Frederik - The Mother Trip" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

burning. It was a deadly dangerous star, and it was only the dense, damp clouds
in their atmosphere that kept the radiation from cremating every one of them at
birth. Humans, of course, were physically repulsive to them. Humans did not have
armored claws or vibrissae. Humans had only twelve senses, not nineteen, and two
of the senses they did have ("pain and "heat ) seemed ridiculously unimportant
to the Get. The Get clustered together, interlocking mouthhooks touching
spirades, and murmured to each other reassuringly and lovingly. (They didn't
know it was lovingly; they had no way to relate to each other that was anything
but loving.) They shuddered in apprehension at the physical qualities of humans.
Humans seemed so deformed.
Of course, even the Get sometimes fell short of physical perfection. Moolkri
himself had a birth defect that damaged his second instar. Their wisest
evaluator lacked a limb, and so he would never be a breeder. (Therefore, he
would never want to.) But all of the Get had the power to change their shape
when they wanted to. Humans did not seem to have that power. They were condemned
to inhabit forever the bodies they were born to, except for such rude mechanical
devices as they used to replace teeth or assist sight or the daubs of paint and
odor-producing substances that some humans employed to enhance their natural
appearance. This seemed a terrible punishment to the Get.
But they tried not to judge. They had seen other races and, compared to them,
none seemed particularly attractive, and most were awful.
East of Arcata the road leaps rivers, looping through the foothills. There
stands a long, low clapboard building with some of the windows replaced with
plywood. It is more than a hundred years old. It wears its history in every
scar. All day the logging trucks thunder down past it out of the Klamath
Mountains, continuing their long-term systematic eradication of the redwood
forests. Three of them have gone out of control and plunged through one corner
of the building or another in the past thirty years.
No one wants to live in this house; it is like living next to the number one pin
in a bowling alley. The porch stops short at the northwest corner. An
eight-hundred-horsepower diesel tractor carried that piece of it away in 1968.
The nine-foot log it was towing minced the driver's head; you can still see
stains on the clapboard. The sign in front of the house now says:
Klamath Valley Center
for Development of
Human Potential
One of Moolkri's drones had buzzed all around it for more than seven days,
cataloguing the human creatures as well as the other fauna of the area
(dragonflies, moths, rabbits, twenty-three kinds of birds, forty relitiles and
amphibia, microorganisms past counting). There were sixteen of the humans, and
they were playing a game.
The Get understood games. They enjoyed play. They even understood
consciousness-raising games; those were the only games they ever played, except
for athletic ones like vibrissa trilling and obstacle scuttling. They discovered
the name of the human game was "Primal Weekend, which meant nothing to them, but
watching the game itself was a grand spectator sport. The cluster squirmed
itself into such position that all several score of them could see clearly into
one monitor or another. They studied the pictures the drone was transmitting
with, for the first time since they had approached this messy little G-type
star, a certain empathy and joy.