"Walter Jon Williams - Surfacing (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

There was a splash far out in the marina. The Las Madres seal chasing a fish. Philana was still staring at him. He looked back.


"WTiy are you afraid of my getting close to the Dwellers?" she asked.


"You've been here two days. You don't know them. You're making all manner of assumptions about what they're like, and all you've read is one obsolete article."


"You're the expert. But if my assumptions are wrong, you're free to tell me."


"Humans interacted with whales for centuries before they learned to speak with them, and even now the speech is limited and often confused. I've only been here two and a half years."


"Perhaps," she said, "you could use some help. Write those papers of yours. Publish the data."


He turned away. "I'm doing fine," he said.


"Glad to hear it." She took a long breath. "What did I do, Anthony? Tell me."


"Nothing," he said. Anthony watched the marina waters, saw the amphibian surface, its head pulled back to help slide a fish down its gullet. Philana was just standing there. We, thought Anthony, are in a condition of non-resolution.


"I work alone," he said. "I immerse myself in their speech, in their environment, for months at a time. Talking to a human breaks my concentration. I don't know how to talk to a person right now. After the Dwellers, you seem perfectly ..."


"Alien?" she said. Anthony didn't answer. The amphibian slid through the water, its head leaving a short, silver wake.


The boat rocked as Philana stepped from it to the dock: "Maybe we can talk later," she said. "Exchange data or something."


18 Walter Jon Williams


"Yes," Anthony said. "We'll do that." His eyes were still on the seal. Later, before he went to bed, he told the computer to play Dweller speech all night long.


Lying in his bunk the next morning, Anthony heard Philana cast off her yacht. He felt a compulsion to talk to her, apologize again, but in the end he stayed in his rack, tried to concentrate on Dweller sounds. I/We remain in a condition of solitude, he thought, the Dweller phrases coming easily to his mind. There was a brief shadow cast on the port beside him as the big flying boat rose into the sky, then nothing but sunlight and the slap of water on the pier supports. Anthony climbed out of his sleeping bag and went into town, provisioned the boat for a week. He had been too close to land for too long: a trip into the sea, surrounded by nothing but whales and Dweller speech, should cure him of his unease.


Two Notches had switched on his transponder: Anthony followed the beacon north, the boat rising easily over deep blue rollers. Desiring sun, Anthony climbed to the flybridge and lowered the canvas cover. Fifty miles north of Cabo Santa Pola there was a clear dividing line in the water, a line as clear as a meridian on a chart, beyond which the sea was a deeper, purer blue. The line marked the boundary of the cold Kirst current that had journeyed, wreathed in mist from contact with the warmer air, a full three thousand nautical miles from the region of the South Pole. Anthony crossed the line and rolled down his sleeves as the temperature of the air fell.


He heard the first whale speech through his microphones as he entered the cold current: the sound hadn't carried across the turbulent frontier of warm water and cold. The whales were unclear, distant and mixed with the sound of the screws, but he could tell from the rhythm that he was overhearing a dialogue. Apparently Sings of Others had joined Two Notches north of Las Madres. It was a long journey to make overnight, but not impossible.