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

"...We survived the Collision," she said. "We are surviving now. Our purpose is
to help others. We will never die..." Over and over.

To help others. It was good to have a purpose, he thought. It lifted him out of
the dull ache of the cold, that reached him even here.

He slept as much as he could.

No-Sun pulled her broad feet out from under him, dumping him onto the hard ice.
It was like a second birth. The ice was dazzling white, blinding him. Spring.

The sun was low to his right, its light hard and flat, and the sky was a deep
blue-black over a landscape of rock and scattered scraps of ice. On the other
horizon, he saw, the land tilted up to a range of mountains, tall, blood-red in
the light of the sun. The mountains were to the west of here, the way the sun
would set; to the east lay that barren plain; it was morning, here on the ice.

East. West. Morning. Spring. The words popped into his head, unbidden.

There was an austere beauty about the world. But nothing moved in it, save human
beings.

He looked up at his mother. No-Sun was a skinny wreck; her fur hung loose from
her bones. She had spent herself in feeding him through the winter, he realized.

He tried to stand. He slithered over the ice, flapping ineffectually at its hard
surface, while his mother poked and prodded him.

There was a sound of scraping.

The people had dispersed across the ice. One by one they were starting to
scratch at the ice with their long teeth. The adults were gaunt pillars, wasted
by the winter. There were other children, little fat balls of fur like himself.

He saw other forms on the ice: long, low, snow heaped up against them, lying
still. Here and there fur showed, in pathetic tufts.

"What are they?"

His mother glanced apathetically. "Not everybody makes it."

"I don't like it here."

She laughed, hollowly, and gnawed at the ice. "Help me."

After an unmeasured time they broke through the ice, to a dark liquid beneath.
Water.

When the hole was big enough, No-Sun kicked him into it.