"Eric Brown - Pithecanthropus Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Eric)

in darkness and thrashing around and shouting for help. Gradually, with a
sense of relief I suspected was ill-founded, I returned to consciousness.
I felt the reassuring physical form of a human body assume substance
around my shattered psyche. I almost whooped for joy - surely anything was
better than the sensory deprivation I had just undergone. Then some vague
recollection of my last experience made itself known to me. I opened my
eyes, and I was no longer aboard the Sol orbital satellite.

Anyone born on Earth might have called this paradise. To me, conceived on
Venus and a Spacer ever since, it was purgatory. The clear blue sky went
on for ever without the reassuring confines of a dome, and on all sides
the land stretched away with nothing more substantial than scrub and
sun-parched trees between me and the distant horizon. To someone
accustomed to overcrowded orbital agglomerations, the sudden sense of
infinity was overwhelming. My head spun with agoraphobia.
More disconcerting than the geographical dislocation, however, was the
fact that I was no longer in my own body. Ridiculous as it may seem, the
lean, hairless body of my former self was no more. In its place was the
squat, hirsute frame of a being one step above the ape. My arms hung down
to my bowed knees in a manner both negligent and thuggish. I was naked. I
tried to protest, but all that came out was a plaintive scale of grunts.
I had been this way before. Now I recognised the body by the parallel claw
marks on its belly and the missing left big toe. That first... seizure...
had lasted mere seconds before I was returned to my own body. I had
retained but a hazy recollection of the interlude, the alien landscape and
the even more alien body. I had managed to convince myself that the
experience was the flashback effect of certain pharmaceutical substances
partaken of during my time as an Engineman for the Canterbury Line. Which
still might be the case... But I doubted it. There was something very real
about the way I inhabited this proto-human form beneath the open, searing
sun...
For the first time I became aware that I was not alone. A hundred metres
ahead of me was a small band of short, trotting creatures; it was some
minutes before I realised that I - or rather the body that I inhabited -
was one of their number. There was something about their diminutive
stature, their hairiness and the way they almost skulked across the plain,
that leant them the aspect of animals. One of their number turned, grunted
and gestured at me to hurry; and there was something at once reassuring in
the familiarity of the human gesture, and frightening in the fact that
this identified me unmistakably as one of them...
Warily, I began shambling in pursuit. The absence of the big toe gave me a
wild, swaying gait. I approached the band but kept my distance. They
jogged across the plain with the stealth of the hunters I assumed they
were. They carried rocks and lengths of wood in such a fashion as to
suggest they had discovered their application as weapons. I alone was
unarmed.
After what I judged to be about ten minutes we came to a gorge or rift in
the land. Here the flat, scorched plain came to an abrupt end, and fell
away in a deep, steep-sided valley. A river bisected the valley bottom,
and the land on either side was lush and green.