"Ian Watson - The People on the Precipice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

happens."
"That'll be one of friend Smear's fancy ideas, I suppose?" Tumbler spat
contemptuously into space. "What a strain _that_ would be, and what peril,
compared with migrating sideways. My dear Bounce, it's all very well to climb
up a few ledges, and down a few ledges. Indeed this keeps all our muscles in
trim. But to climb one way only? Faugh! Do you imagine our grandchildren would
reach a _top_? Or a _bottom_, suppose we migrated downwards? And what would be
at this imaginary bottom? Bones and rubbish and shit, floating in foul water,
I shouldn't be surprised!"
"I didn't mention any bottom."
"And what would be at this top of yours? Not that it exists! I'll tell
you: a place where our muscles would weaken through disuse so that we could no
longer harvest the precipice. We'd starve within a generation. Our present way
of life is perfect."
"Clinging on by your fingertips all life long is perfect?" she
retorted. "There might be a huge flat space up at the top -- with oodles of
really big plants all over, because they wouldn't have to worry about their
weight ripping them away."
"What's wrong with hanging on by one's fingertips, pray?"
"A certain tendency to _fall_," she said. "Especially when you get old
and sick and mad and exhausted."
I spoke up, since something had been worrying me for a while. "When we
migrated here, it seemed to me that this particular patch of precipice
hereabouts was ... well, strangely familiar. When we arrived I felt as if I'd
been here before -- when I was only a child. All the cracks and finger-grips
were somehow known to me."
"That," said Tumbler, "is purely because of the expertise you develop
at clinging on after twenty or thirty years."
"So why do experienced adults ever fall off?"
"They get tired and ill and crazy," said Bounce. "Everyone does, in the
end, after a lifetime of clinging on."
"We always migrate leftward," I pointed out.
"Obviously! Who on earth would migrate back to a patch which had been
stripped the time before?"
"What if," I asked, "the sum total of our migrations has brought us
back to the very same place where we were years ago? What if our precipice
isn't a straight wall but a vast ... um..."
"A vast cylinder," said Bounce.
Tumbler pointed impatiently to the right where the view was more
barren. "Look: if that isn't straight -- !"
"Maybe it only seems straight," said Splatty unexpectedly, "because
it's so enormous. Maybe it bends ever so slightly? We can't actually see the
bend, but after tens of years of travel ... If so, what's the sense in
migrating?"
"To find food, slippy-thumb! To survive! Suppose we do come back to the
same patch eventually -- so what? The pastures have fleshed out again."
"It's hardly _progress_," said Bounce.
"Progress? Cylinders? Bends? Have you people gone nuts? Are you
planning to let go and dive into the abyss? This is all Smear's fault. Listen:
we hang on by the skin of our teeth. We make daily forays up and down for