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

The prolific land around the central sea was divided into neat shapes, he saw
now, and here and there smoke rose. It was a made landscape. The work of people.

Humans were sheltered here. It was a final irony, that people should find
shelter at the bottom of the great pit dug out of the Earth by the
world-wrecking Collision.

...And there was a color to that deep, cupped world, emerging now from the mist.
Something he had never seen before; and yet the word for it dropped into place,
just as had his first words after birth.

"Green," Frazil said.

"Green. Yes..."

He was stunned by the brilliance of the color against the black rock, the dull
blue-gray of the sea. But even as he looked into the pit of warmth and air, he
felt a deep sadness. For he already knew he could never reach that deep shelter,
peer up at the giant green living things; this body which shielded him from cold
would allow heat to kill him.

Somebody spoke.

He cried out, spun around. Frazil was standing stock still, staring up.

There was a creature standing here. Like a tall, very skinny human.

It was a human, he saw. A woman. Her face was small and neat, and there was
barely a drop of fat on her, save around the hips, buttocks and breasts. Her
chest was small. She had a coat of some fine fur -- no, he realized with shock;
she was wearing a false skin, that hugged her bare flesh tightly. She was
carrying green stuff, food perhaps, in a basket of false skin.

She was twice his height.

Her eyes were undoubtedly human, though, as human as his, and her gaze was
locked on his face. And in her eyes, he read fear.

Fear, and disgust.

He stepped forward. "We have come to help you," he said.

"Yes," said Frazil.

"We have come far--"

The tall woman spoke again, but he could not understand her. Even her voice was
strange -- thin, emanating from that shallow chest. She spoke again, and
pointed, down toward the surface of the sea, far below.