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 обратная связь
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| 'Since it is impossible for you to be my partner, you must suffer being my slave. The spirit of enquiry is all but dead in you; you will respond to orders but not to observation.' | «Поскольку ты считаешь невозможным быть моим партнером, тебе придется стать моим рабом. Дух познания мертв в тебе; ты будешь выполнять приказы». |
| 'I don't know what you are saying!' He cried the words aloud, waking Yattmur, who sat up and gazed mutely at him. | — Я не понимаю, о чем ты говоришь! — закричал Грэн вслух. Крик его разбудил Яттмур; она села и молча посмотрела на Грэна. |
| 'You neglect so much!' said the morel. 'I can only see things through your senses, yet I take the trouble to analyse and find what is behind them. You can make nothing from your data, whereas I can make a lot. Mine is the way to power. Look about you again! Look at the stones over which you climb so regardlessly.' | «Ты слишком многим пренебрегаешь, — продолжал морэл. — Я могу познавать мир только через твои ощущения, и тем не менее я анализирую их, пытаясь найти, что за ними сокрыто. Там, где ты не извлекаешь абсолютно ничего из полученной информации, я имею очень много. Путь, по которому я иду, ведет к могуществу. Посмотри еще раз по сторонам, на эти камни, по которым ты лазаешь, не обращая на них никакого внимания». — Убирайся! — закричал снова Грэн. |
| 'Go away!' Gren cried again. Instantly he doubled up in anguish. Yattmur came running over to him, holding his head and soothing him. She peered into his eyes. The tummy-bellies came up silently to stand behind her. | И в тот же миг согнулся пополам от пронзившей его боли. Яттмур подбежала к нему и взяла в свои ладони его голову, пытаясь облегчить Грэну страдания. Она заглянула ему в глаза. Подошли Рыбаки и молча встали у нее за спиной. |
| 'It's the magic fungus, isn't it?' she said. | — Это — волшебный грибок? — спросила она. |
| Dumbly he nodded. Phantoms of fire chased themselves over his nerve centres, burning a tune of pain through his body. While the tune continued he could scarcely move. At length it passed. Limply he said, 'We must help the morel. He wishes us to explore these rocks more carefully.' | Грэн слабо кивнул. Все его тело жгла нестерпимая боль. Казалось, она сейчас разорвет его на части. Грэн не мог даже пошевелиться. Наконец, боль утихла. Почти шепотом он сказал: — Мы должны помочь морэлу. Он хочет, чтобы мы очень внимательно осмотрели эти камни. |
| Trembling in every limb, he rose to do what was commanded of him. Yattmur stood with him, sympathetically touching his arm. | Дрожа всем телом, он поднялся, чтобы выполнить приказ. Яттмур стояла рядом, держа его за руки. |
| 'When we've explored, we will catch fish in the pool and eat them with fruit,' she said, with a woman's talent for producing comfort when it was needed. | — После того, как осмотрим камни, мы наловим рыбы и съедим ее вместе с плодами, — вымолвила она нежно, почувствовав, что сейчас Грэн, как никогда, нуждается в поддержке. |
| He flashed her a humble look of gratitude. | Грэн посмотрел на нее с благодарностью. |
| The big stones had long been part of the natural landscape. Where the brook ran among them they were buried in mud and pebbles. Grass and sedge grew on them, deep earth covered them in many places. In particular, here prospered a crop of the flowers that bore their seed pods aloft on tall stalks, which the humans had seen from the iceberg; these Yattmur had casually called Stalkers, without realizing until much later how appropriate the title was. | Большие камни когда-то составляли часть естественного пейзажа. Там, где раньше бежал ручей, сейчас были только грязь и галька. На них росли трава и осока. Люди увидели растение, у которого коробочки с семенами раскачивались на высоких стеблях. Это растение привлекло их внимание еще тогда, когда они находились на айсберге. Яттмур в шутку назвала их сталкерами[1], и лишь со временем все поняли, каким точным оказалось это определение. |
| Over the stones ran the roots of the Stalkers, like so many lengths of petrified snake. | По камням, словно большая застывшая змея, бежали корни сталкера. |
| 'What a nuisance these roots are,' grumbled Yattmur. "They grow everywhere!' | — Посмотри, какие странные эти растения, — усмехнулась Яттмур. — Они растут почти везде. |
| 'The funny thing is the way the roots from one plant grow into another as well as into the ground,' Gren said, answering abstractedly. He was squatting by a branch of two roots, one of which ran back to one plant, one to another. After they had joined, they curled over a block of stone and down into an irregular gap between other stones to the earth. 'You can get down there. You will come to no harm,' said the morel. 'Scramble down between the stones and see what you can see.' A hint of that painful tune sprang again over Gren's nerves. He scrambled down between the blocks as he was directed, nimble as a lizard for all his reluctance. Feeling cautiously, he discovered that they rested on other blocks below, and those on other blocks below that. They lay loosely; by twisting his body he was able to slide himself down between their cool planes. Yatmur climbed after him, showering down a gentle rain of dirt on to his shoulders. After crawling down the depth of five blocks, Gren reached solid ground. Yattmur arrived beside him. Now they were able to move horizontally, half squashed between the walls of stone. Attracted by a lessening in the darkness, they squeezed along to a large space, large enough for them to stretch out their arms. 'The smell of cold and dark is in my nostrils and I am afraid,' Yattmur said. 'What has your morel made us come down here for? What has he to tell of this place?' 'He is excited,' Gren replied, unwilling to admit that the morel was not communicating with him. Gradually they began to see more clearly. The ground above had fallen away to one side, for the source of light was the sun, shining in horizontally between the piled stone, sending a thin ray probing there. It revealed twisted metal among the blocks, and an aperture ahead of them. In the collapse of these stones long ago, this gap had remained. Now the only living things here beside themselves were stalker roots, twisting down into the soil like petrified serpents. Obeying the morel, Gren scrabbled in the grit at his feet. Here was more metal and more stone and brick, most of it immovable. Fumbling and tugging, he managed to pull out some broken bits of guttering; then came a long metal strip as tall as himself. One end of it was shattered; on the rest of it was a series of separate marks arranged to form a pattern: "That is writing,' wheezed the morel, 'a sign of man when he had power in the world, uncounted ages ago. We are on his tracks. These must once have been his buildings. Gren, climb forward into the dark aperture and see what else you can find.' 'It is dark! I cannot go in there.' 'Climb forward, I tell you.' Shards of glass glinted dully by the aperture. Rotted wood fell away all round it as Gren put a hand forward to steady himself. Plaster showered down on his head as he climbed through. On the other side of the aperture was a drop; Gren slid down a slope of rubble into a room, cutting himself on glass as he went. From outside, Yattmur gave a squeak of alarm. He called back softly to reassure her, pressing a hand to his heart to steady it. Anxiously he stared about in the all-but-blackness. Nothing moved. The silence of the centuries, thick and cloying, lay here, lived here, more sinister than sound, more terrible than fear. For a spell he stood frozen, until the morel nudged him. Half the roof had collapsed. Metal beams and brick made a maze of the room. To Gren's untutored eye, everything was indistinguishable. The ancient smell of the place choked him. 'In the corner. A square thing. Go there,' ordered the morel, using his eyesight to advantage. Reluctantly, Gren picked his way across to the corner. Something scuttled from under his feet and out the way he had come; he saw six thick fingers, and recognized a crawlpaw like the one that had seized Yattmur's ankle. A square box three times his height loomed over him, its front surface marked by three protruding semi-circles of metal. He could reach only the lowest of these semi-circles, which, the morel instructed him, were handles. He tugged at it obediently. It opened the width of a hand, then stuck. 'Pull, pull, pull!' twanged the morel. Growing savage, Gren pulled till the whole box rattled, but what the morel termed the drawer would come no farther. Still he pulled, while the tall box shook. Something was dislodged from the top of it. From high above Gren's head, an oblong thing came crashing down. As he ducked, it fell to the floor behind him, sending up a cloud of dust. 'Gren! Are you all right? What are you having to do down there? Come out!' 'Yes, yes, I'm coming! Morel, we'll never open this stupid box thing.' 'What's this object that nearly hit us? Examine it and let me see. Perhaps it is a weapon. If we could only find something to help us... ' The thing that had fallen was thin, long, and tapered, like a flattened burnurn seed. It seemed to be composed of a material with a soft surface, not cold like metal. The morel pronounced it to be a container. When it found that Gren could lift it with comparative ease, it became excited. 'We must carry this container to the surface,' it said. 'You can pull it up between the stones. We will examine it in daylight and find what it contains.' 'But how can the thing help us? Will it get us to the mainland?' 'I didn't expect to find a boat down here. Have you no curiosity? This is a sign of power. Come on, move! You are as stupid as a tummy-belly.' Smarting under this gross insult, Gren scrambled back up the debris to Yattmur. She clutched him, but would not touch the yellow case he carried. For a moment they whispered together, pressing each others' genitals to gain strength; then they struggled up between the layers of tumbled stone back to daylight, dragging and pushing the container with them. ' Phooo! Daylight tastes sweet!' Gren muttered as he levered himself up the last block. As they emerged bruised and cut into the misty air, up came the tummy-bellies scampering, their tongues lolling out in relief. Dancing round their masters, they raised a hullabaloo of complaint and reproach at their absence. 'Kill us please, pretty cruel master, before you jump again into the lips of the earth! Stab us with wicked killing before you leave us alone to fight unknown fights alone!' 'Your bellies are too fat for you to have squeezed down that crevice with us,' Gren said, ruefully examining his wounds. 'If you're so pleased to see us, why not get us some food?' When Yattmur and he had bathed their cuts and bruises in the stream, he turned his attention to the container. Squatting over it carefully, he turned it over several times. There was a strangeness about its symmetry that alarmed him. Evidently the tummy-bellies felt the same. 'That very bad strange shape for touching is a strange bad touching shape,' one of them wailed, dancing up and down. 'Please only do a touching for throwing it into the splashing watery world.' He clung to his companions, and they peered down in silly excitement. 'They offer you sensible advice,' Yattmur said, but with the morel urging him, Gren sat down and took the container between feet and fingers. While he examined it, he felt the fungus snatch at his impressions as soon as they arrived in his brain; shivers ran along his spine. On the top of the container was one of the patterns that the morel called writing. This one resembled heckler or HHT303H depending on which way you looked at it, and was followed by several lines of similar but smaller patterns. He began to tug and push at the container. It did not open. The tummy-bellies quickly lost interest and wandered away. Gren himself would have flung the thing aside, had the morel not kept him at it, poking and pressing. As he ran his fingers along one of the longer sides, a lid flipped open. He and Yatt-mur looked askance at one another, then peered down at the object in the container, squatting in the dirt and gaping with awe. The object was of the same silky yellow material as its container. Reverently, Gren lifted it out and placed it on the ground. Releasing it from the box activated a spring; the object, which had been wedge-shaped to conform to the dimensions of its resting place, suddenly sprouted yellow wings. It stood between them, warm, unique, perplexing. The tummy-bellies crept back to stare. 'It's like a bird,' Gren breathed. 'Can it really have been made by men like us and not grown?' 'It's so smooth, so... ' Words failing, Yattmur put out a hand to stroke it. 'We will call it Beauty.' Age and the endless seasons had puckered its container; the winged thing remained as new. As the girl's hand ran over its upper surface, a lid clicked back, revealing its insides. Four tummy-belly men dived for the nearest bush. Fashioned of strange materials, of metals and plastics, the insides of the yellow bird were marvellous to behold. Here were small spools, a line of knobs, a glimpse of amplifying circuits, a maze of cunning intestines. Full of curiosity, the two humans leant forward to touch. Full of wonder, they let their fingers – those four fingers with opposed thumb that had taken their ancestors so far – enjoy the delight of toggle switches. The tuning knobs could be twiddled, the switches clicked! With scarcely a murmur, Beauty rose from the ground, hovered before their eyes, rose above their heads. They cried with astonishment, they fell backwards, breaking the yellow container. It made no difference to Beauty. Superb in powered flight, it wheeled above them, glowing richly in the sun. When it had gained sufficient altitude, it spoke. 'Make the world safe for democracy!' it cried. Its voice was not loud but piercing. 'Oh, it speaks!' cried Yattmur, gazing in delight at the flashing wings. Up came the tummy-bellies, running to join in the excitement, falling back in apprehension when Beauty flew over them, standing baffled as it circled round their heads. 'Who rigged the disastrous dock strike of '31?' Beauty demanded rhetorically. "The same men who would put a ring through your noses today. Think for yourselves, friends, and vote for srh – vote for freedom!' 'It – what is it saying, morel?' Gren asked. 'It is talking of men with rings through their noses,' said the morel, who was as baffled as Gren. 'That is what men wore when they were civilized. You must try to learn from what it is saying.' Beauty circled round one of the tall stalkers and remained overhead, buzzing slightly and emitting an occasional slogan. The humans, feeling they had gained an ally, were greatly cheered; for a long while they stood with their heads back, watching and listening. The tummy-bellies beat their stomachs in delight at its antics. 'Let us go back and try to unearth another toy,' Yattmur suggested. After a moment's silence, Gren replied, 'The morel says not. He wants us to go down when we do not want to; when we want to go, he does not. I do not understand.' | — Самое интересное, что корни одного растения могут срастаться с корнями другого или уходить в землю, — сказал Грэн, приседая возле двух сросшихся корней, один из которых уходил к одному растению, другой — к другому. А в том месте, где корни срослись, они, огибая камень, сквозь трещину уходили вниз, к земле. |
| 'Then you are foolish,' grumbled the morel. 'This circling Beauty will not get us ashore. I want to think. We must help ourselves; especially I wish to observe these stalker plants. Keep quiet and don't bother me.' | «На сегодня — хватит», — сказал морэл. — «Можете спускаться обратно». — И, помолчав немного, добавил: — «Я хочу подумать. Мы должны помочь себе сами. Больше всего меня заинтересовали сталкеры. А сейчас — ведите себя тихо и не мешайте мне». |
| It did not communicate with Gren for a long while. He and Yattmur were free to bathe again in the pool, and wash the underground dirt from their bodies and hair, while the tummy-bellies lolled near at hand, scarcely complaining, hypnotized by the yellow bird that circled tirelessly above them. Afterwards, they hunted over the ridge of the islet, away from the tumbled stones; Beauty wheeled above them following, occasionally crying 'The srh and a two-day working week!' CHAPTER NINETEEN | Он не общался с Грэном довольно долго. Грэн и Яттмур вновь были предоставлены самим себе. XIX |
| BEARING in mind what the morel had said, Gren took more notice than before of the stalker plants. Despite their strong and interlinked root structure, the actual flowers were of a lowly order, though, canted towards the sun, they attracted the cordate butterflies. Beneath five bright and simple petals grew a disproportionately large seed pod, a sexfid drum, from each face of which protruded gummy and fringed bosses resembling sea anemones. | Помня о том, что говорил морэл, Грэн внимательно присматривался к сталкерам. Несмотря на наличие мощной корневой системы, цветы явно находились на более низкой ступени развития, хотя и тянулись к солнцу, привлекая сердцевидных бабочек. Под пятью простыми яркими лепестками находился непропорционально большой стручок с семенами, похожий на шестигранную коробочку. Пушистые семена наполовину выступали из коробочки, напоминая морские анемоны. |
| All this Gren observed without interest. What happened to the flowers on fertilization was more sensational. Yattmur was passing one of them when a treebee bumbled past her and landed on the blossom, crawling over its pistil. The plant responded to pollination with violence. With an odd shrilling noise, flower and seed drum rocked up skywards on a spring that unravelled itself from the drum. | Все это Грэн отметил без особого интереса. Но вот то, что происходило со сталкером после оплодотворения, было удивительным. Яттмур проходила мимо одного из них, когда на цветок села древесная пчела и залезла в пестик. На опыление цветок отреагировал мгновенно. Со странным свистящим звуком цветок и коробочка взметнулись в небо, подброшенные пружиной, вырвавшейся из коробочки. |
| Yattmur dived into the nearest bush in startlement, Gren close behind. Cautiously they watched; they watched the spring unwind more slowly now. Warmed by the sun, it straightened and dried into a tall stalk. The six-sided drum nodded in sunlight, far above their heads. | Яттмур и Грэн, напуганные и удивленные одновременно, бросились под ближайший куст. Они увидели, что пружина раскручивается уже медленнее. Скорее всего, под воздействием солнечных лучей она выпрямилась и превратилась в длинный стебель. Высоко над ними в лучах солнечного света плавно качнулась шестигранная коробочка. |
| For the humans, the vegetable kingdom offered no wonders. Anything that held no menace held little interest. They had already seen these stalkers, waving high in the air. 'Statistics prove that you are better off than your bosses,' Beauty said, flying round the new pole and returning. 'Be warned by what happened to the Bombay Interplanetary Freight Handlers' Union! Stand up for your rights while you still have them. Only a few bushes away, another stalker rattled up into the air, its stalk straightening and gaining rigidity. | Королевство растений мало интересовало людей. Все, что не представляло собой опасности, утрачивало для них всякую привлекательность. Они уже видели сталкеров, раскачивавшихся высоко в небе. Недалеко от них взметнулся вверх еще один. |
| 'Let's get back,' Gren said. 'Let's go and have a swim.' | — Пошли обратно, — сказал Грэн. — Давай лучше искупаемся. |
отрывок случайной книги
(Олдисс Брайан, "Долгие сумерки Земли")
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