"Frank Herbert - Destination Void 3 The Lazarus Effect" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

Islanders float with the waves and the winds and the currents. Mermen would
control these forces and control us.

Islanders bend with things that might otherwise overwhelm them. They are
accustomed to change but grow tired of it. Mermen fight against certain kinds
of change -- and are growing tired of that.

Now, I come to my view of what Ship did with us. I think it is the nature of
our universe that life may encounter a force that could overwhelm it if life
cannot bend. Mermen would break before such a force. Islanders bend and drift.
I think we may prove the better survivors.




We bear our original sin in our bodies and on our faces.

-- Simone Rocksack, Chaplain/Psychiatrist


The cold slap of a sudden wave over the side snapped Queets Twisp full awake.
He yawned, unkinked his overlong arms where they had tangled themselves in the
tarp. He wiped the spray from his face with his shirtsleeve. Not yet full
sunrise, he noted. The first thin feathers of dawn tickled the black belly of
the horizon. No thunderheads cluttered the sky and his two squawks, their
feathers preened and glistening, muttered contentedly on their tethers. He
rubbed the circulation back into his long arms and felt in the bottom of the
coracle for his tube of thick juice concentrates and proteins.

Blech.

He made a wry face as he sucked down the last of the tube. The concentrate was
tasteless and odorless, but he balked at it just the same.

You'd think if they made it edible they could make it palatable, he thought. At
least dockside we'll get some real food. The rigors of setting and hauling
fishing nets always built his appetite into a monumental thing that concentrates
could support, but never satisfy.

The gray ocean yawned away in all directions. Not a sign of dashers or any
other threat anywhere. The occasional splatter of a sizable wave broke over the
rim of the coracle but the organic pump in the bilge could handle that. He
turned and watched the slaw bulge of their net foam the surface behind them. It
listed slightly with its heavy load. Twisp's mouth watered at the prospect of a
thousand kilos of scilla -- boiled scilla, fried scilla, baked scilla with cream
sauce and hot rolls . . .

"Queets, are we there yet?" Brett's voice cracked in its adolescent way. Only
the shock of his thick blonde hair stuck out from under their tarp -- a sharp
contrast to Twisp's headful of ebony fur. Brett Norton was tall for sixteen,