"Gene Wolfe - The Fifth Head of Cerberus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

with dust.)
"I wonder if either of you noticed the stone implements in the room through
which we passed a few moments ago?"
We nod, each hoping the other will speak.
"Were they made on Earth, or here on our own planet?"
This is a trick question, but an easy one. David says, "Neither one. They're
plastic." And we giggle.
Mr Million says patiently, "Yes, they're plastic reproductions, but from where
did the originals come?" His face, so similar to my father's, but which I thought of at
this time as belonging only to him, so that it seemed a frightening reversal of nature to
see it on a living man instead of his screen, was neither interested, nor angry, nor
bored; but coolly remote.
David answers, "From Sainte Anne." Sainte Anne is the sister planet to our own,
revolving with us about a common center as we swing around the sun. "The sign said
so, and the aborigines made them--there weren't any abos here."
Mr Million nods, and turns his impalpable face toward me. "Do you feel these
stone implements occupied a central place in the lives of their makers? Say no."
"No."
"Why not?"
I think frantically, not helped by David, who is kicking my shins under the table.
A glimmering comes.
"Talk. Answer at once."
"It's obvious, isn't it?" (Always a good thing to say when you're not even sure
"it" is even possible.) "In the first place, they can't have been very good tools, so why
would the abos have relied on them? You might say they needed those obsidian
arrowheads and bone fishhooks for getting food, but that's not true. They could
poison the water with the juices of certain plants, and for primitive people the most
effective way to fish is probably with weirs, or with nets of rawhide or vegetable
fiber. Just the same way, trapping or driving animals with fire would be more
effective than hunting; and anyway stone tools wouldn't be needed at all for gathering
berries and the shoots of edible plants and things like that, which were probably their
most important foods--those stone things got in the glass case here because the
snares and nets rotted away and they're all that's left, so the people that make their
living that way pretend they were important."
"Good. David? Be original, please. Don't repeat what you've just heard."
David looks up from his book, his blue eyes scornful of both of us. "If you could
have asked them, they would have told you that their magic and their religion, the
songs they sang and the traditions of their people were what were important. They
killed their sacrificial animals with flails of seashells that cut like razors, and they
didn't let their men father children until they had had stood enough fire to cripple
them for life. They mated with trees and drowned the children to honor their rivers.
That was what was important."
With no neck, Mr Million's face nodded. "Now we will debate the humanity of
those aborigines. David negative and first."
(I kick him, but he has pulled his hard, freckled legs up beneath him, or hidden
them behind the legs of his chair, which is cheating.) "Humanity," he says in his most
objectionable voice, "in the history of human thought implies descent from what we
may conveniently call Adam; that is, the original Terrestrial stock, and if the two of
you don't see that, you're idiots."
I wait for him to continue, but he is finished. To give myself time to think, I say,