"Tricia Sullivan - The Question Eaters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sullivan Tricia)

The Question Eaters - short story by Tricia Sullivan



The Question Eaters
a short story by Tricia Sullivan
John watched. The sky had warmed from dark green to a burnished bronze,
the color of age. Over the plain the spires inside the research station
seemed sharp and clear, yet unimaginably remote across the distance of
graying sand. The sky sucked color from the ground; green lay only on the
edges of the dunes. The hollows were ashen.
Someone had told John this plain had once been an ocean. He tried to
imagine waves covering the dark ground, but the effort made him sick. He
was not even aware of his own sweat, and he sometimes felt light enough to
float. Water was starting to seem like poison.
"Bowl," the crone said suddenly. Her voice cracked out of the long silence
like one of the fissures in the hardened clay of the desert floor.
He jerked his head toward her. Her profile was almost entirely collapsed
around the bones of her skull. Her eyes were far recessed. He had not seen
her lips move, and her face was still now. But the voice had come from
her.
He could not see a bowl anywhere. The tent was open on all sides; there
was no place to hide.
"Break," said the boy behind John. He tossed a glass bead into the eye
socket of a lizard skull.
The crone was silent.
"Carry. Fill. Paint. Make. Roll." The boy tripped the words out so
quickly, John could hardly follow.
"Water," said the crone.
The boy, dark-skinned, seemed uncannily human. Adolescence made his voice
crack.
"Fill," he said at last.
John willed himself not to move. Light was failing rapidly. With the tips
of his fingers he coded notes into his personal data unit. He was so
well-practiced at this he hardly thought about it.
The boy speaks only in verbs. Woman-thing persists in using single nouns.
He defies her.
Now why had he said that? The boy stood up, overturning his seat, which
proved to be a hollowed shell rather like a tortoise's. In the boy's hands
it molded into a simple bowl, a large smooth thing of symmetry. John
wondered if he should delete the last sentence of his entry. Under the
eyes of the boy the bowl began to fill with water. John could smell it.
Hypothesis: observer witnessing some manifestation in physical terms of
sandwriting language. Each has some role. Are they physically present or
not?
Still, the sense of defiance. He stared at the boy's hands, at the lovely
lines of tendons and veins under the skin, the graceful long fingers.
He had never expected them to seem so human. How could the woman, awkward
and misshapen, squatting on the dark sand, belong to the same species as
the boy? And this was to say nothing of the third. Three of their kind