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

The creatures - I could not bring myself to call them men, though the
evidence was mounting that they were indeed just that - crouched on the
lip of the escarpment in attitudes of wariness. They took cover behind
sparse trees and infrequent boulders, peered into the valley and from time
to time pointed.
As I scanned the valley bottom I made out the subject of their interest.
Beside the river, in a green meadow of knee-high grass, a group of figures
- as humanlike as my compatriots - lay about or sat watching the water.
They too were naked, small and hairy. I tried, and failed, to find in them
some difference, some evidence that they were somehow less human than my
band, to excuse what I sensed was about to happen.
At a gesture from our leader - a tall creature with a monstrous, flattened
face - the band charged en masse down the steep incline, yelling and
waving their clubs.
And I lost consciousness.
I experienced the familiar sensation of being afloat in darkness, of
struggling towards some unseen point of safety. One by one I felt my
senses return - and last of all my sight. I was in my own body again, but
naked, and wading waist-deep in the freezing waters of an effluent
conduit. Par for the course, this; last time, I had managed to creep back
to my cubby without being seen, and I endeavoured to do so again. I waded
from the wide steel trough and ran naked through the darkened industrial
sector of Sol City, fear and dread pounding in my head like migraine.

26th May, 2060.
Proxmire Industrial Solar Satellite.
The day following the 'seizure' I skipped work - I just couldn't bring
myself to leave the cubby. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling, six
inches above my nose. Eventually I could stand no more - there was
something about just lying and waiting for the first hint of backbrain
tickle that was more horrific than the actual experience. The following
shift I went to work. I thought that the familiar routine of the job might
take my mind off what had happened to me. But I thought wrong.
I worked as a coffin-engineer for Sol Funeral Services Inc - and while I'd
rather have worked on bigships or shuttles, coffins were easy and the
money was good. I did a six hour shift each 'day'. The first three hours I
spent in the control room, a cosy bleb that adhered to the turning collar
of the station and provided a constant view of Sol burning outside. From
here I loaded coffins into the breach by remote control and, with the
service over and the mourners gathered by the viewscreen, I pressed the
button that sent the jet-powered coffins on graceful trajectories towards
the big fire. Once out of sight, the coffin ejected its passenger into the
sun and turned for home. The second half of my shift I spent repairing and
servicing the coffins I'd sent out earlier, tuning the jets, spraying the
casks with new coats of silver paint burned off on each run, and in
general readying the coffins for their next trip.
That 'morning' I sent three casks on their way, and in the 'afternoon' I
tinkered around with them in the service bay. I usually took pride in my
work, enjoyed the manual labour of replacing faulty jets and test firing
the coffins on a quick orbit of the satellite - but today my heart wasn't