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

Salt water smarted on the cuts on Anthony's face. His swollen knuckles


6 Walter Jon Williams


pained him as he tapped the keys of his computer deck. He never suffered from hangover, and his mind seemed filled with an exemplary clarity; he worked rapidly, with burning efficiency. His body felt energized.


I/YOU


A9140 OILY(5).


TOTALITY OF FEEDING


HAPPY TENDRILITY


IN WARMNESS(3)


He was out of the cold Kirst Current today, in a warm, calm subtropical sea on the other side of the Las Madres archipelago. The difference of forty nautical miles was astonishing.


The sun warmed his back. Sweat prickled on his scalp. The sea sparkled


under a violet sky.


The other Dweller answered.


Through his bare feet, Anthony could feel the subsonic overtones vibrating through the boat. Something in the cabin rattled. The microphones recorded the sounds, raised the subsonics to an audible level, played it back. The computer made its attempt.


A9140 was a phrase that, as yet, had no translation.


The Dweller language, Anthony had discovered, had no separation of subject and object; it was a trait in common with the Earth cetaceans whose languages Anthony had first learned. "I swim toward the island" was not a grammatical possibility: "I and the island are in a condition of swimming toward one another" was the nearest possible approximation.


The Dwellers lived in darkness, and, like Earth's cetaceans, in a liquid medium. Perhaps they were psychologically unable to separate themselves from their environment, from their fluid surroundings. Never approaching the surfaceЧit was presumed they could not survive in a non-pressurized environmentЧthey had no idea of the upper limit of their world.


They were surrounded by a liquid three-dimensional wholeness, not an air-earth-sky environment from which they could considej>themselves separate.