"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автораplanetary system, which we nicknamed Skinwalker
because it was where we would find the shape-shifters, the more frightened the Newbie became. He was scared, terrified! I asked what he was so frightened of, and he answered, "We are subject to different stimulae; we are frightened of how we have grown to adapt to the native circumstances." "You're scared you're no longer the same species!" I accused. The Newbie said nothing, going limp againЧits usual response to information it could not handle. Of course it couldn't. ... I had just suggested that unity was bifurcated, that what had been one was now two! The Newbie had no words inside its head to explain that concept: it conceived of itself as every- thing and nothing ... all of the Newbie species at once and nothing of itself. How can you divide "everything" into two piles, one of which is still labeled "everything"? The Newbie was starting to realize that whatever was waiting for us on Skinwalker was not the Newbie raceЧnot anymore. It was terrified of what its own people had become, just as Arlene and I were terrified of what Earth would look like when we finally re- turned. weeks, but it never did anything but sit on the table, unmoving, and answer questions we asked it. It never initiated conversations or tried to move. We sur- veilled it, watching through an air-circulation grate to see what it did when it thought no one was around; either it didn't do anything or else it knew somehow that we were there. Sears and Roebuck told me that there was a hidden video system aboard the ship, used by the captain to spy on the rest of his crew, but we couldn't find it, and we had thrown most of the Freds overboard on Fredworld, so we couldn't revive the captain to tell us himself . . . even if that idea weren't so utterly stupid that I wouldn't even mention it to my lance. Gradually, we came to accept the immobile, silent alien in the sickbay, then we started even to forget he was there at all. I found myself and Arlene casually talking in front of him about stuff he really wasn't cleared to hear. After all, he was still the representa- tive of the enemy, even if he and they had evolved in separate directions for forty years, which was the equivalent of possibly forty million dog years. Five weeks into the eight-week voyage, Arlene ex- perienced every Marine's worst nightmare: something |
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