"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора

planetary 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.
We hawk-watched the Newbie for the first couple of
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