"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автораskin: "When you found the Newbies, what was their
technological level?" "Techno tackno crackno farmer harmerЧ" "Were they industrial or agricultural?" "Culture vulture nultureЧ" "Rumplestiltskin will answer. Were the Newbies technological?" "Evils! We came to herd as they herded we came to harvest as they harvested we came to wander as they wandered we came to herd as they herded!" Herding . . . harvestingЧnomads? Farmers, just discovering animal husbandry? I prodded the undead Fred for another half hour, eliciting little other infor- mation. The best I could tell was that the "Newbies" had evidently just discovered agriculture and ranch- ing; they were just settling down from their nomadic life when the Fred scoutship observed and studied them. They made contact with the Newbies and fought a few skirmishes, just probing them. The Freds returned to Fredworld; this was probably three hundred or more years back, just around the time the first Fred expedition returned from contact with Earth. The Freds horsed around for a while, not long, then they returned to the Newbie system, just a couple of hundred years after they left . . . only to agriculture to a heavily armed, spacefaring culture in just two centuries! And that's where Rumplestiltskin started to get hazy. The rest of the interrogation was long, tedious, boring, tedious, dull, and tedious; even Sears and Roebuck lost interest and started monkeying with the navigational system ... which was unlocked, now that we'd reached the preprogrammed destination. I figured Sears and Roebuck had never interrogated a prisoner before; it's not a process for the impatient. I got a story, but I had no idea whether I got the story. This is what I finally dragged out of old Rump, with me and Arlene making a lot of intuitive leaps and filling in the background as best we could: when the Freds arrived at the Newbie planet, ready to take the "empty" square in the giant chess game between the Hyperrealists and the Deconstructionists, they discovered a weird, unknown piece on the board. The Newbies must have an accelerated evolution that is as fast compared to us humans as we are compared to the rest of the galaxy! The Newbies were so stellar that they tore through the Fred fleet like a cat through a fleet of canaries. And thenЧthis was the part neither I nor Arlene |
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