"Theodore Sturgeon - More Than Human" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

More Than Human



MORE THAN HUMAN
Part 1: The Fabulous Idiot
Part 2: Baby Is Three
Part 3: Morality


Part One:
The Fabulous Idiot

The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the nickering
of fear. His clothes were old and many-windowed. Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and
there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his
face was dead.
Men turned away from him, women would not look, children stopped and watched him. It did not
seem to matter to the idiot. He expected nothing from any of them. When the white lightning struck, he
was fed. He fed himself when he could, he went without when he could. When he could do neither of
these things he was fed by the first person who came face to face with him. The idiot never knew why,
and never wondered. He did not beg. He would simply stand and wait. When someone met his eyes there
would be a coin in his hand, a piece of bread, a fruit. He would eat and his benefactor would hurry away,
disturbed, not understanding. Sometimes, nervously, they would speak to him; they would speak about
him to each other. The idiot heard the sounds, but they had no meaning for him. He lived inside
somewhere, apart, and the little link between word and significance hung broken. His eyes were excellent,
and could readily distinguish between a smile and a snarl; but neither could have any impact on a creature
so lacking in empathy, who himself had never laughed and never snarled and so could not comprehend
the feelings of his gay or angry fellows.
He had exactly enough fear to keep his bones together and oiled. He was incapable of anticipating
anything. The stick that raised, the stone that flew found him unaware. But at their touch he would
respond. He would escape. He would start to escape at the first blow and he would keep on trying to
escape until the blows ceased. He escaped storms this way, rockfalls, men, dogs, traffic, and hunger.
He had no preferences. It happened that where he was there was more wilderness than town; since he
lived wherever he found himself, he lived more in the forest than anywhere else.
They had locked him up four times. It had not mattered to him any of the times, nor had it changed
him in any way. Once he had been badly beaten by an inmate and once, even worse, by a guard. In the
other two places there had been the hunger. When there was food and he was left to himself, he stayed.
When it was time for escape, he escaped. The means to escape were in his outer husk; the inner thing that
it carried either did not care or could not command. But when the time came, a guard or a warden would
find himself face to face with the idiot and the idiotтАЩs eyes, whose irises seemed on the trembling point of
spinning like wheels. The gates would open and the idiot would go, and as always the benefactor would
run to do something else, anything else, deeply troubled.

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 More Than Human


He was purely animalтАФa degrading thing to be among men. But most of the time he was an animal
away from men. As an animal in the wood he moved like an animal, beautifully. He killed like an animal,