"Jack C. Haldeman II & Jack Dann - High Steel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Jack C)

"We'd better go," he said. "Some of them may still be alive."
They followed him. They would have followed him anywhere.
 It was cold on the mesa top; the sky was just beginning to lighten. The smoky dawn blurred the sharp
pinpoints of stars and once again returned shape and substance to the world.
Leonard Broken-finger crouched on his haunches before the yawning opening of the vision pit. He
held a leather bag that had belonged to his great-grandfather. But the bones and stones and roots and
relics it contained were his own medicine.
The medicine the spirits had given him in a dream.
The young man in the vision pit made stirring noises. His name was Jonas Goodbird. He was tall and
ganglyтАФtaller than anyone on the reservation. He was not handsome, yet the women said he had a way
about him. Jonas never seemed to lack for a woman.
"You've been here four days," said Broken-finger. "Your vision quest is over. I hope Wakan Tanka
has helped you."
"I'm still alive," said Jonas in a quavering, unbelieving voice.
"Of course you are; though by all appearances, not by much." He made a gurgling sound deep in his
throat, which was his way of laughing. As long as anyone in the tribe could remember, the medicine man
had not smiled. Stories were told that his lips would break like pottery; and children still made a game of
trying to get old Broken-finger to laugh and break his lips. They had never succeeded.
Jonas was getting ready to leave the vision pit. It would take a few minutes for him to gather his wits.
Broken-finger left him to this and walked to the edge of the mesa. He faced east. He was like a gnarled
tree, already shaped by the wind.
The dry, cracked gullies stretched out below him, faded brown and red in the morning mist. And once
again Broken-finger felt that this would be a good time to die. He was tired, yet strong. But it was not his
time ... not yet. He looked longingly at the towering rock formations below him. Those were the shapes
of time.
They did not have to bear the weight of flesh and spirit.
He thought of others he had walked down from the vision pit. There had been many. Some blurred
into the darkness of deep memory, some stood out like figures carved out of light. He thought of John
Stranger, gone now three winters, taken by the wasicun. He was special; the spirits clung to him like fire
to good hard wood.
The sun broke the horizon.
He raised his arms to the heavens and stood that way for endless moments. He stared at the rising sun
as if he were at Sundance.
He felt the cold brush of wings.
Wakinyan-tanka ...
He has wings, yet has no shape.
There were terrible things happening.
There were beautiful things happening.
It was a time of changes, a shifting of the order.
And he felt the presence of the thunder-beings. An overwhelming sadness seemed to engulf him. He
felt empty, as if his organs and sinew had been turned into air, into dust, into sunlight. He held his arms
high, for they were without weight. A tear made a shiny trail down his dry, wrinkled cheek, as if squeezed
out of his squinting, blinded eyes.
Yet he smiled for the first time in fifty years.
The presence of the ancient spirit creatures was a sign. He would live a little longer. His people would
survive a little longer.
His lips cracked and blood ran down his chin, dribbling onto his brown yet frail chest.
And he thought of John Stranger.
They arrived at the ruined station before the rescue vehicles. From the outside it looked to be the
disaster that it was. One end had been torn away, leaving a twisted mass of beams, wires and pipes.