Fantastic Stories Presents: Science Fiction Super Pack #2. Randall Garrett

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was one of these attributes that now enabled her to sense what happened on the path ahead of her. She stopped still, only her long fur moving in the breeze.

      *

      Phildee—five, towheaded, round faced, chubby, dressed in a slightly grubby corduroy oversuit, and precocious—had his attributes, too. Grubby and tousled; branded with a thread of licorice from one corner of his mouth to his chin; involved in the loss of his first milk-tooth, as he was—he nevertheless slipped onto the path on Riya’s world, the highest product of Terrestrial evolution. Alice followed a white rabbit down a hole. Phildee followed Reimann down into a hole that, at the same time, followed him, and emerged—where?

      Phildee didn’t know. He could have performed the calculation necessary to the task almost instantly, but he was five. It was too much trouble.

      He looked up, and saw a gray slope of rock vaulting above him. He looked down, and saw it fall away toward a plain on which were scattered pairs of foraging animals. He felt a warm breeze, smelled it, saw it blow dust along the path, and saw Riya:

       B is for big brown beast.

       L is for looming large, looking lonely.

       B? L? Bull? No—bison.

       Bison:

      bison (bi’sn) n. The buffalo of the N. Amer. plains.

      Phildee shook his head and scowled. No—not bison, either. What, then? He probed.

      Riya took a step forward. The sight of a living organism other than a person was completely unfamiliar to her. Nevertheless, anything that small, and undeniably covered—in most areas, at least—with some kind of fur, could not, logically, be anything but a strange kind of calf. But—she stopped, and raised her head—if a calf, then where was the call?

      Phildee’s probe swept past the laboring mind directly into her telepathic, instinctual centers.

      Voiceless, with their environment so favorable that it had never been necessary for them to develop prehensile limbs, female people had nevertheless evolved a method of child care commensurate with their comparatively higher intelligence.

      Soft as tender fingers, gentle as the human hand that smooths the awry hair back from the young forehead, Riya’s mental caress enfolded Phildee.

      Phildee recoiled. The feeling was:

Warm	}	Not candy in the mouth
Soft	}
Sweet	}
Candy in the mouth	{	Familiar
{	Good
{	Tasty
{	Nice
The feeling was
{	Not Familiar
{	Not Good
{	Not Tasty
{	Not Nice

      

      WHY?:

       M is for many motionless months.

       T is for tense temper tantrums.

       R is for rabid—NO!—rapid rolling wrench.

       MTR. Mother.

      Phildee’s mother wanted Phildee’s father. Phildee’s mother wanted green grass and apple trees, tight skirts and fur jackets on Fifth Avenue, men to turn and look, a little room where nobody could see her. Phildee’s mother had radiation burns. Phildee’s mother was dead.

      He wavered; physically. Maintaining his position in this world was a process that demanded constant attention from the segment of his mind devoted to it. For a moment, even that small group of brain cells almost became involved in his reaction.

      It was that which snapped him back into functioning logically. MTR was Mother. Mother was:

Tall	}	“In Heaven’s name, Doctor, when will this thing be over?”
Thin	}
White	}
Biped	}

      BL was Riya. Riya was:

       Big brown beast, looming large, looking lonely.

       BL=MTR

       Equation not meaningful, not valid.

      *

      Almost resolved, only a few traces of the initial conflict remained. Phildee put the tips of his right fingers to his mouth. He dug his toe into the ground, gouged a semicircular furrow, and smoothed it over with his sole.

      Riya continued to look at him from where she was standing, two or three feet away. Haltingly, she reached out her mind again—hesitating not because of fear of another such reaction on Phildee’s part, for that had been far beyond her capacity to understand, but because even the slightest rebuff on the part of a child to a gesture as instinctive as a Terrestrial mother’s caress was something that none of the people had ever encountered before.

      While her left-behind intellectual capacity still struggled to reconcile the feel of childhood with a visual image of complete unfamiliarity, the warm mind-caress went gently forth again.

      Phildee made up his mind. Ordinarily, he was immune to the small emotional problems that beclouded less rational intellects. He was unused to functioning in other than a cause/effect universe. Mothers were usually—though sometimes not—matronly women who spent the greater part of roughly twenty years per child in conscious pre-occupation with, and/or subconscious or conscious rejection of, their offspring.

      In his special case, Mother was a warm place, a frantic, hysteric voice, the pressure of the spasmodically contractile musculature linked to her hyperthyroid metabolism. Mother was a thing from before birth.

      Riya—Riya bore a strong resemblance to an intelligent cow. In any physiological sense, she could no more be his mother than—

      The second caress found him not unaccustomed to it. It enfolded his consciousness, tenderly, protectingly, empathetic.

      Phildee gave way to instinct.

      *

      The СКАЧАТЬ