"Frank Herbert - Seed Stock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

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Seed Stock

Frank Herbert, 1970




When the sun had sunk almost to the edge of the purple ocean, hanging there like a giant orange
ball-much larger than the sun of Mother Earth which he remembered with such nostalgia-Kroudar
brought his fishermen back to the harbor.

A short man, Kroudar gave the impression of heaviness, but under his shipcloth motley he was as
scrawny as any of the others, all bone and stringy muscle. It was the sickness of this planet, the doctors
told him. They called it 'body burdens,' a subtle thing of differences in chemistry, gravity, diurnal periods
and even the lack of a tidal moon.

Kroudar's yellow hair, his one good feature, was uncut and contained in a protective square of red cloth.
Beneath this was a wide, low forehead, deeply sunken large eyes of a washed-out blue, a crooked nose
that was splayed and pushed in, thick lips over large and unevenly spaced yellow teeth, and a melon chin
receding into a short, ridged neck.

Dividing his attention between sails and shore, Kroudar steered with one bare foot on the tiller.

They had been all day out in the up-coast current netting the shrimp-liketrodi which formed the colony's
main source of edible protein. There were nine boats and the men in all of them were limp with fatigue,
silent, eyes closed or open and staring at nothing.

The evening breeze rippled its dark lines across the harbor, moved the sweat-matted yellow hair on
Kroudar's neck. It bellied the shipcloth sails and gave the heavily loaded boats that last necessary surge
to carry them up into the strand.

Men moved then. Sails dropped with a slatting and rasping. Each thing was done with sparse motion in
the weighted slowness of their fatigue.

Trodihad been thick in the current out there, and Kroudar pushed his people to their limit. It had not
taken much push. They all understood the need. The swarmings and runnings of useful creatures on this
planet had not been clocked with any reliable precision. Things here exhibited strange gaps and breaks in
seeming regularity. Thetrodi might vanish at any moment into some unknown place as they had been
known to do before.

The colony had experienced hunger and children crying for food that must be rationed. Men seldom
spoke of this any more, but they moved with the certain knowledge of it. More than three years now,
Kroudar thought, as he shouldered a dripping bag oftrodi and pushed his weary feet through the sand,
climbing the beach toward the storage huts and racks where the sea creatures were dried for processing.
It had been more than three years since their ship had come down from space.