"Bruce Holland Rogers - Big Far Now" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

the tapes were definitely talking.
"Mowza want fruit?" asked Joanna's voice on a typical tape.
"Mowza want, yes. Give Mowza, give Mowza," answered the scratchy, childish voice of one of
Joanna's subjects.
For about a week, everyone was delighted. A life-form smart enough for speech! But our excitement
died down sooner than you'd expect. From Joanna's own reports, we gathered that the Shies didn't really
have a language of their own, that they had learned to speak chiefly as a way to earn the fruit she had
gathered. They had generally poor memories and could learn only a small vocabulary. They didn't really
have a culture, not in any sense we could recognize. It looked as though we hadn't yet discovered a new
consciousness with which to compare our own, at least not one that we could converse with freely. Since
most of us still had a lot of work to do just trying to determine how we could earn the right to stay on this
planet, the talking Shies were soon no big deal to anyone but Joanna, who stayed in the field with them
more and more and left me more and more alone.
My own crew created another stir for a time when we found two hemispheres like the halves of some
spherical canister buried four feet below the surface in a survey field. The things were corroded iron and
very brittle. We thought at first that they must be artifacts. Then we found more, and they were so
uniformly featureless -- no hinges or clasps or anything to show that they were ever attached to one
another -- and there was so much other iron evident in that area, that we started to ask ourselves
whether they could be naturally occurring, and the stir about our "archaeological" find soon died down.
About this time I started a part of my own work that could basically run itself. My crew and I had
taken some surface mineral samples to calibrate my survey satellite, and now all we had to do was turn
the thing on for a while and let the computers on board the Kepler record and analyze the data that came
in as the satellite made repeated passes over all of Veloz. In other words, we had time on our hands, and
I started to look for something to do. So I climbed domewoods.
I haven't said much about the trees on Veloz, but they were tremendous. From the enormous
towertrees to spindlelegs and walking arches, the forest was a maze of trunks. But the most spectacular
tree was one without a trunk. Or maybe you could say the domewood was nothing but trunk.
Domewoods were rare, probably because they had a hard time starting on the low light of the forest
floor. They began as little red knobs springing up through the black soil. If they happened to start in a
spot with enough light, they would begin to spread out in all directions like a stain, except that they grew
in thickness as well. They grew slowly, but irresistibly, and at their edges they knocked over other trees.
Once they got going, they could grow to enormous proportions. Not far from our camp, there was one
that was over a kilometer across. Its outer edges ran up like red wooden cliffs from the forest floor.
We had used the translucent inner bark of the domewood for construction. It dried into tough, glassy
plates. The red outer bark was photosynthetic.
On my third day with little to do, I had one of my metallurgists make me some long steel spikes, and I
took a heavy bag of them into the forest with me. I hammered in foot-and handholds and climbed, adding
new holds as I needed them, until I could walk upright on the gradually decreasing slope.
It was wonderful, as I walked up toward the summit of the trees, to see the forest canopy spreading
out beneath me. It was the first such view I had had of Veloz. After all, even though Mount Meeker rose
from the forest floor near our camp, it was covered with trees. As far as I knew, I was the only person
who had thought of climbing a domewood to get a look around. I was busy congratulating myself, when
someone appeared over the horizon of the tree. Her back was to me as she stood looking out over the
green expanse. It was Joanna.
Suddenly I could feel the weight of my boots crushing the domewood bark, and I felt my throat
pulsing, could almost hear my heartbeat. When I was a little closer, I said, "Hi, Jo."
She started and turned. "David!" she said. She sounded like she really was happy to see me.
I motioned toward the canopy below us and at the domewood under our feet. "I thought I was the
first."
She laughed. "I've been coming up here since the first time I came out chasing Shies."