THE SUBTLE KNIFE 精彩片段：
CHAPTER TWELVE SCREEN LANGUAGE-1
Tell me again," said Dr. Oliver Payne, in the little laboratory overlooking the park. "Either I didnt hear you, or youre talking nonsense. A child from another world?"
"Thats what she said. All right, its nonsense, but listen to it, Oliver, will you?" said Dr. Mary Malone. "She knew about Shadows. She calls them—it—she calls it Dust, but its the same thing. Its
our shadow particles. And Im telling you, when she was wearing the electrodes linking her to the Cave, there was the most extraordinary display on the screen: pictures, symbols .... She had an instrument too, a sort of compass thing made of gold, with different symbols all around the rim.
And she said she could read that in the same way, and she knew about the state of mind, too—she knew it intimately."
It was midmorning. Lyras Scholar, Dr. Malone, was red-eyed from lack of sleep, and her colleague, whod just returned from Geneva, was impatient to hear more, and skeptical, and preoccupied.
"And the point was, Oliver, she was communicating with them. They are conscious. And they can respond. And you remember your skulls? Well, she told me about some skulls in the Pitt-Rivers Museum. Shed found out with her compass thing that they were much older than the museum said, and there were Shadows—"
"Wait a minute. Give me some sort of structure here. What are you saying? You saying shes confirmed what we know already, or that shes telling us something new?"
"Both. I dont know. But suppose something happened thirty, forty thousand years ago. There were shadow particles around before then, obviously—theyve been around since the Big Bang—but there was no physical way of amplifying their effects at our level, the anthropic level. The level of human beings. And then something happened, I cant imagine what, but it involved evolution.
Hence your skulls—remember? No Shadows before that time, lots afterward? And the skulls the child found in the museum, that she tested with her compass thing. She told me the same thing.
What Im saying is that around that time, the human brain became the ideal vehicle for this amplification process. Suddenly we became conscious."
Dr. Payne tilted his plastic mug and drank the last of his coffee.
"Why should it happen particularly at that time?" he said. "Why suddenly thirty-five thousand years ago?"
"Oh, who can say? Were not paleontologists. I dont know, Oliver, Im just speculating. Dont you think its at least possible?"
"And this policeman. Tell me about him."