Odnośniki
- Indeks
- Alan Dean Foster Alien 01 Alien
- Alan Dean Foster Commonwealth 04 Voyage To The City of the Dead
- Foster, Alan Dean Catechist 03 A Triumph of Souls
- Alan Dean Foster Commonwealth 05 Sentenced to Prism
- Alan Dean Foster Smart Dragons, Foolish Elves
- Alan Dean Foster Obcy 8 Pasazer Nostromo
- Alan Dean Foster SS4 The Moment Of The Magician
- Debra Dean Confessions of a Fallen Woman (pdf)(1)
- Foster, Alan Dean Commonwealth 01 Phylogenesis
- Foster, Alan Dean Damned 1 Call to Arms
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- torres9.htw.pl
understand that desire. All right, he said.They followed the markers over
the beltway, ev-entually heading west across the great expanse of the North
American continent. They did not see even one other car in the hours left of
the night. In the silence and gently thrumming music of the blades beneath
them, Leo fell asleep, once more.
Chapter FourAs Hulann drove, he allowed his mind to wander, for a deluge of
memories seemed the only present manner of assauging his depression.
Therefore, he raised up a mono-lith of the past and walled off the recent
events, then studied the brickwork of his partition.He had met his first human
while aboard the naoli ship Tagasa which had been of the private fleet of the
central committee. He had been a guest of the government, a writer of creative
history then. The Tagasa had been en-route from the home worlds to a series of
outlying col-ony planets in the Nucio System. The rich background of the Nucio
colonies had been obvious material for a series of tapebook adventures, and
Hulann had been quick to take the chance to investigate the worlds
first-hand.The Tagasa had been in port on the world called Dala, a place of
vegetation and no animals. He had returned to his cabin after a day of
exploration of the surrounding jungle. He had seen the snake vines which moved
almost as fast as a man could walk, slipping oily over each other and the
trees on which they grew, pollinating the flowers that grew on the bark of
some of the larger pines. He had seen the plants which ate other plants (and
which impolitely spat out his finger when, at the urging of his guide, he had
stuffed it into the pulpy orifice). He saw the breathing plants with their
baggy, lunglike flowers, busy spewing out carbon dioxide to continue the cycle
that had started here eons earlier. An incredibly old culture, his guide had
said. To have evolved plant life this far. No animals at all? he
asked. None. They've found a few insects, little mites, that live between the
outer and second layer of bark on the red-top trees. Ah . . . But there's a
question about those two. Seems the boys working on them in the labs have
found traces of chlorophyll in them. You mean Plants too. Looking quite
like insects. Mobile. Able to suck up nutriment from other plants and move
about like animals. The guide an elderly naoli with a jewelry affecta-tion: he
wore a raw iris stone around his neck on a wood bead necklace had shown him
more. The Quick Ferns, for instance. Cute little, frilly, green things, lush
and vibrant, swaying briskly under the slightest breath. They lined the forest
floor, the shortest growth, a carpet beneath all else. As he watched, they
grew, pushed up new plants, spread their feathery leaves then grew brown,
blackened, collapsed, gave off a puff of spores, and were gone. In a place
where there was no animal feces, no animal decay, the vegetation had come to
rely on its own death to give it life. For so much life there was a wild,
thick sprawl of growing things unlike any-thing he had ever seen before a
great deal of fertilizer was required. It was natural, then, that the Quick
Ferns should have a total life span, from spore germination to death of the
plant and ejection of the next spore cycle of fourteen minutes. At the end of
each summer on Dala, there was a five foot layer of thick, black organic
mate-rial lying on, the forest floor. By the following spring, it was
decomposed, gone, and the Quick Ferns began their job again. No animals at
all, he said to the guide, still amazed at the society of this primitive
world. Not now, the guide replied, chuckling. What's that? I said, not now.
There used to be. How do you know? They've found the fossils, he said,
fingering the stone hanging about his withered neck. Thousands of them. Not
any that might have been possessed by intelli-gent creatures. Primitive
animals. Some small dinosaurs. What happened to them? Hulann asked,
fascinated.The old naoli waved his arms around at the jungle. The plants
happened to them. That's what. The plants just developed a little faster. They
think the animals were a slow lot. When the first ambulent plants arrived on
the scene, they ate flesh. Hulann shivered.The forest seemed to close in on
him, to grow from just a pleasant patch of trees to something malevolent and
purposeful. He felt himself backing away toward their shuttlecraft, stopped
himself, and chided himself for his youthful superstition. Yet now the plants
are finally subservient to animals. To us. Wouldn't be so certain, the old
man said. He pulled on the iris stone. The warmth of his gnarled hand made the
black and green gem pulsate, the green iris growing larger and smaller with
the changes in temperature. How so? The plants are trying to adapt to us.
Hunting a way to do us in. Hulann shivered. Now you're talking the kind of
su-perstition I just got finished scolding myself for. It's not superstition.
Couple of years ago, the first Concrete Vines showed up. They Yeah. Eat
concrete. The wall of the central adminis-tration building fell in. Killed a
hundred and some. Roof collapsed under the stress. Later, they found a funny
thing. They found these vines, only as big around as the tip of your tail,
honeycombing the wall. They had come in from the forest edge, growing [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]