"Gardner Dozois - A Special Kind of Morning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

The number was too big to grasp. Our minds fumbled at it while we
marched, and gave up. It was too big.

I stared at Ren's back as we walked, a nearly invisible mannequin
silhouette, and tried to multiply that out to the necessary figure. I
staggered blindly along, lost and inundated beneath thousands of
individual arms, legs, faces; a row of faces blurring off into infinity, all
screamingтАФand the imagining nowhere near the actuality.

Billions.

How many restless ghosts out of that many deaders? Who do they
haunt? Billions.

Dawn caught us about two hours out. It came with no warning, as
usual. We were groping through World's ink-dark, moonless night,
watched only by the million icy eyes of evening, shreds of witchfire crystal,
incredibly cold and distant. I'd watched them night after night for years,
scrawling their indecipherable hieroglyphics across the sky, indifferent to
man's incomprehension. I stopped for a second on a rise, pushing back the
infrared lenses, staring at the sky. What program was printed there, suns
for ciphers, worlds for decimal points? An absurd questionтАФI was nearly
as foolish as you once, buckтАФ but it was the first fully verbalized thought
I'd had since I'd realized the nakedness of flesh, back there on the parapet
as my life tore itself apart. I asked it again, half-expecting an answer,
watching my breath turn to plumes and tatters, steaming in the silver chill
of the stars.

The sun came up like a meteor. It scuttled up from the horizon with
that unsettling, deceptive speed that even natives of World never quite get
used to. New light washed around us, blue and raw at first, deepening the
shadows and honing their edges. The sun continued to hitch itself up the
sky, swallowing stars, a watery pink flush wiping the horizon clear of
night. The light deepened, mellowed into gold. We floated through silver
mist that swirled up around the mountain's knobby knees. I found myself
crying silently as I walked the high ridge between mist and sky, absorbing
the morning with a new hunger, grappling with a thought that was still
too big for my mind and kept slipping elusively away, just out of reach.
There was a low hum as our warmsuits adjusted to the growing warmth,
polarizing from black to white, bleeding heat back into the air. Down the
flanks of the Blackfriars and away across the valley belowтАФ visible now as
the mists pirouetted past us to the summitsтАФthe night plants were dying,
shriveling visibly in mile-long swaths of decay. In seconds the Blackfriars
were gaunt and barren, turned to hills of ash and bone. The sun was now a
bloated yellow disk surrounded by haloes of red and deepening scarlet,
shading into the frosty blue of rarefied air. Stripped of softening
vegetation, the mountains looked rough and abrasive as pumice, gouged
by lunar shadows. The first of the day plants began to appear at our feet,
the green spiderwebbing, poking up through cracks in the dry earth.