"02 - Infinity's Shore" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

Afflictions of the mind.

Holes gape across his life, vast blank zones, lightless and empty, where missing memories must once have spanned megaparsecs and life years. Each gap feels chilled beyond numbness-a raw vacancy more frustrating than an itch that can't be scratched.

Ever since he began wandering this singular world, he has probed the darkness within. Optimistically, he clutches a few small trophies from the struggle.

Jijo is one of them.

He rolls the word in his mind-the name of this planet where six castaway races band together in feral truce, a mixed culture unlike any other beneath the myriad stars.

A second word comes more easily with repeated use- Sara. She who nursed him from near death in her tree house overlooking a rustic water mill . . . who calmed the fluxing panic when he first woke to see pincers, claws, and mucusy ring stacks-the physiques of hoons, traekis, qheuens, and others sharing this rude outcast existence.

He knows more words, such as Kurt and Prity . . . friends he now trusts almost as much as Sara. It feels good to think their names, the slick way all words used to come, in the days before his mangling.

One recent prize he is especially proud of.

Emerson . . .

It is his own name, for so long beyond reach. Violent shocks had jarred it free, less than a day ago-shortly after he provoked a band of human rebels to betray their urrish allies in a slashing knife fight that made a space battle seem antiseptic by comparison. That bloody frenzy ended with an explosive blast, shattering the grubby caravan tent, spearing light past Emerson's closed lids, overwhelming the guardians of reason.

And then, amid the dazzling rays, he had briefly glimpsed ... his captain!

Creideiki . . .

The blinding glow became a luminous foam, whipped by thrashing flukes. Out of that froth emerged a long gray form whose bottle snout bared glittering teeth. The sleek head grinned, despite bearing an awful wound behind its left eye . . . much like the hurt that robbed Emerson of speech.

Utterance shapes formed out of scalloped bubbles, in a language like none spoken by Jijo's natives, or by any great Galactic clan.

* In the turning of the cycloid,
* Comes a time to break for surface.
* Time to resume breathing, doing.

* To rejoin the great sea's dreaming.
* Time has come for you my old friend.
* Time to wake and see what's churning. ... *

Stunned recognition accompanied waves of stinging misery, worse than any fleshy woe or galling numbness.

Shame had nearly overwhelmed him then. For no injury short of death could ever excuse his forgetting Creideiki ...

Terra . . .
The dolphins . . .
Hannes . . .
Gillian . . .

How could they have slipped his mind during the months he wandered this barbarian world, by boat, barge, and caravan?

Guilt might have engulfed him during that instant of recollection . . . except that his new friends urgently needed him to act, to seize the brief advantage offered by the explosion, to overcome their captors and take them prisoner.

As dusk fell across the shredded tent and torn bodies, he had helped Sara and Kurt tie up their surviving foes-both urrish and human-although Sara seemed to think their reprieve temporary.