"Baxter, Stephen - Huddle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

For Night-Dawn, everything was different after that.

He was the Bull. He could couple with who he liked. He stayed with Frazil. But
even coupling with Frazil brought him little pleasure.

One day he was challenged by another young man called One-Tusk, over a woman
Night-Dawn barely knew, called Ice-Cloud.

"Fight, damn you," One-Tusk lisped.

"We shouldn't fight. I don't care about Ice-Cloud."

One-Tusk growled, pursued him for a while, then gave up. Night-Dawn saw him try
to mate with one of the women, but she laughed at him and pushed him away.

Frazil came to him. "We can't live like this. You're the Bull. Act like it."

"To fight, to eat, to huddle, to raise children, to die.... There must be more,
Frazil."

She sighed. "Like what?"

"The Collision. Our purpose."

She studied him. "Night-Dawn, listen to me. The Collision is a pretty story.
Something to make us feel better, while we suck scum out of ice."

That was Frazil, he thought fondly. Practical. Unimaginative.

"Anyhow," she said, "where are the people we are supposed to help?"

He pointed to the western horizon: the rising ground, the place beyond the
blue-gray mountains. "There, perhaps."

THE NEXT DAY, he called together the people. They stood in ranks on the ice,
their fur spiky, rows of dark shapes in an empty landscape.

"We are all humans," he said boldly. "The Collision threw us here, onto the
ice." Night-Dawn pointed to the distant mountains. "We must go there. Maybe
there are people there. Maybe they are waiting for us, to huddle with them."

Somebody laughed.

"Why now?" asked the woman, Ice-Cloud.

"If not now, when? Now is no different from any other time, on the ice. I'll go
alone if I have to."

People started to walk away, back to the ice holes.