"John Varley - Gaea 3 - Demon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

Gaea 3 -- Demon -- John Varley -- (????)

(Version 2003.02.16)


PROPHECY

In the year 2024 the most important single thing which the cinema will
have helped to accomplish will be that of eliminating from the face of the
civilized world all armed conflict. With the use of the universal language of
motion pictures the true meaning of the brotherhood of man will have been
established throughout the Earth...All men are created equal.
-D. W. Griffith, 1924 (Director of "The Birth of a Nation," adapted from
the novel The Klansmen)

Music will always be the voice of the silent drama. There will never be
speaking pictures.
-D. W. Griffith, 1924

All right, D. W., take three...
DEMON

Being the Third Book in The Gaean TrilogyIn which certain events
described in TITAN and WIZARD come to their conclusions,And containing an
account of The End of the World.


SHORT SUBJECTS
Stupidity got us into this mess-why can't it get us out?
-Will Rogers


COMING ATTRACTIONS
The location scout was the first into the valley.
Like most of Gaea's genetically tailored beings, the scout did not have
a sex. It had no mouth and no organs of digestion. What it did have was a pair
of cinemascope eyes and a magnificent spatial sense.
The scout clattered over the valley on spindly rotors, hovered, and
turned slowly. It saw a rushing river beneath twenty-meter cliffs. Above the
cliffs was a plateau of sufficient size, and ringing the plateau were trees
more than sufficient for the needs of the approaching Crew. It felt warm
contentment, like a kitten who has found a bowl of milk. This was the place.
It flew over the trees, spraying them with an attractant pheromone. That
done, it made several passes over the plateau, dropping spores. It settled at
the edge of the plateau, already beginning to feel tired. Its rotor withered
and fell away. Walking on long, feathery legs, it circled the location,
stopping every hundred paces to poke a seed into the ground with a long sharp
organ growing from its belly.
With the last of its strength it made its way into the woods and died.
In twenty revs the plateau was covered with bushes a meter high. Spaced