"Tricia Sullivan - The Question Eaters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sullivan Tricia) were present, but after one glance at it when he first had startled out of
a vague sun-dream to notice the three of them and the shade of their tent, John had avoided looking at the last. He had blocked out the part of his vision that contained it, and the pile of mats on which it lay. "Not everyone has the stomach for this planet, John," Elaine had told him. As the research station psychiatrist, she had treated people for a variety of personality disorders that seemed obscurely linked to the appearance of the sandwriting. Until John had come, no one could read the markings, although everyone in the domed station had seen the lines and shapes creep into existence on the desert sands as though written by invisible hands. The writing hadn't been translated, but its manifestations had coincided with unexplained incidents among the Station personnel: violent nightmares at the least, and in two cases, psychotic episodes and followed by suicide. "Language is the key to xenopsychology," John had told her when he arrived, eight months ago, on special assignment to help the research station cope with the problem. The researchers had not been prepared to run into conflicts with aboriginal ecology: the planet had been lifeless for several thousand years. But John had set to work translating the sandwriting into human terms, and so had begun an uneasy dialog with someone--or something. "Language creates reality," John had continued, wanting to make Elaine understand why his work was important. "It's like, when you are American and you learn to think in Japanese, you don't think the same thoughts. This is just more extreme. Other species have other languages. When we people see the sandwriting, get a glimpse of the alien nature of the language, and experience the kind of contact shock humans always experience when encountering an alien intelligence. And that's where the psychiatric problems come in." "It's a touch far-fetched," Elaine had replied. "For one thing, what makes you so sure that it is a language? This is a dead planet. You need an intelligent species to produce a language." "Humans are an intelligent species," John had said, thinking aloud. "Are you saying that the sandwriting is some kind of... I don't know... some kind of manifestation of the collective unconscious? Don't tell me Jung is coming back into vogue after all these years!" "It's a funny thing," John had mused. "Someone has to start a language, but once it's going it kind of perpetuates itself. The sandwriting language could be a relic left over from some earlier civilization, and now that we're here ... well, I'm not certain. Imagine that a dead species left behind its way of thinking, as the Egyptians left their architecture. And now, any mind will do--this language acts on the substratum of memory and becomes self-propagating." He remembered Elaine's nervous laugh. "Now you make it sound... alive. Almost like a virus." That had been an interesting metaphor. John had just started thinking about the possibilities in it when Elaine grabbed her notebook. "So, tell me," she asked casually, "just how long have you been thinking in these terms?" |
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