"Brin, David - Uplift 5 - Infinity's Shore" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

Finally two centuries ago, Earthlings came, bringing chimpanzees and other treasures. But humans greatest gift was paper. In creating the printed trove of Biblos, they became lore masters to our piteous commonwealth of exiles.аPrinting and education changed tile on the Slope, so that later generations of castaways dared to study their adopted world, their hybrid civilisation, and even their own selves.

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As for why humans came all this way--breaking Galactic laws and risking everything, Just to huddle with other outlaws under a fearsome sky--their tale is among the strangest told by Jijo's exile clans.

-from An Ethnography of the Slope, by Dorti Chang-Jones and Huph-alch-Huo

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Sooners

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Alvin

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I HAD NO WAY TO MARK THE PASSAGE OF TIME, Lying dazed and half-paralyzed in a metal cell, listening to the engine hum of a mechanical sea dragon that was hauling me and my friends to parts unknown.

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I guess a couple of days must have passed since the shattering of our makeshift submarine, our beautiful Wuphon's Dream, before I roused enough to wonder, What next?

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Dimly, I recall the sea monster's face as we first saw it through our crude glass viewing port, lit by the Dream's homemade searchlight. That glimpse lasted but a moment as the huge metal thing loomed toward us out of black, icy depths. The four of us--Huck, Pincer, Ur-ronn, and me--had already resigned ourselves to death . . . doomed to crushed oblivion at the bottom of the sea. Our expedition a failure, we didn't feel like daring subsea adventurers anymore, but like scared kids, voiding our bowels in terror as we waited for the cruel abyss to squeeze our hollowed-out tree trunk into a zillion soggy splinters.

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Suddenly this enormous shape erupted toward us, spreading jaws wide enough to snatch Wuphon's Dream whole.

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Well, almost whole. Passing through that maw, we struck a glancing blow.

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The collision shattered our tiny capsule.а

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What followed still remains a painful blur.

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