"Monica Hughes - Devil On My Back" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Monica)

The wild water pounded Tomi under and as suddenly released him. He popped to the surface
coughing and wheezing. This time he was able to force a tiny thread of air into his sodden lungs before he
was slapped under. His arms and legs moved desperately to regain the surface. One leg struck something
hard and painful. The same something nudged his side and he flung himself at it, clutching it with both
hands. He got one leg across it, heaved himself up and lay with his cheeks pressed against rough
wetness. He brought up the water he had swallowed and lay and groaned.
Whatever had saved him was little better than what he had had before. It bobbed and pitched,
rolled and shuddered and twisted as if it wanted to get rid of him. He clung to it with elbows and knees
and fingernails. With his eyes tightly shut he concentrated on learning how to breathe again. He coughed
until his eyes and nose ran and then threw up again. The water slapped over his face and washed it clean.
Slowly he became aware of the world outside the small circle of pain that was himself. He began
to notice that whatever he was riding was not moving as violently as it had been a moment before, was
no longer trying to throw him back into the water. He opened his eyes to a dazzling world of brilliant
color.
He shut them again, blinked and squinted through half-closed lids to try and make sense of where
he was.
He saw tree bark, thick and deeply cracked, shining wet and slimy with green stuff. It was the
trunk of an enormous tree. He was lying face down on it, and it was moving quite fast along the foaming
surface of a river: it must be the same river he had glimpsed from the Dome of ArcOne.
The river banks were quite close to him. At times his log passed directly beneath the shadow of
one or other of them. But there was no possibility of stopping his log and scrambling ashore. Apart from
the speed at which the river was carrying him along, the banks themselves were of dark shiny rock, split
into vertical fissures, with no horizontal layers or shelves that he might use for hand or foot hold. Above
the steep banks he could glimpse huge trees sliding by, maddeningly out of reach.
Tomi raised his head cautiously and looked ahead. The river cut a channel through the black
rock, sometimes turning to left or right, so that the current, and his log borne on it, swerved from right to
left bank and back. Now and then a brilliance struck the water and turned it into molten metal. At first he
couldn't imagine what it was, because when his log reached these stretches of water they seemed no
different from the others.
A sudden comforting warmth on his soaked and freezing back made him look up into a brilliance
a thousand times brighter than the most powerful light on ArcOne. The sun! As it had been in his dream...
only this was real!
For a moment the realization that he was actually out of doors, under the naked sky and the raw
and burning sun, so terrified him that he clung to his wet cold log with his eyes tightly shut. He trembled.
What am I to do? What can I do?
Hang on. Look around. Observe. Keep calm. His lifepak spoke to him and the familiar voice in
his head soothed his fears. Were all his paks intact, undamaged by his fall and the water? Yes, it seemed
so. Their weight on his back made him feel strong again and able to face whatever lay ahead.
He opened his eyes and looked around again. The river was definitely slowing down. The trees
above his head were not moving by so fast. The river was getting wider too, which wasn't such a good
thing, since he was farther from shore than he had been before. But the banks seemed to be getting
lower, so that if he could get out of the current he should be able to get ashore without too much
difficulty.
All he had to do was to obey his lifepak, hang on, keep from panicking and wait until the current
slackened enough to allow him to paddle his log boat to shore. Then he would walk upstream until he got
back to ArcOne. The slave revolt would be safely over and he would earn a hero's welcome.
He began to feel quite pleased with himself, in spite of the icy coldness of his body and the
various cuts and bruises that were beginning to make themselves felt. I must remember to thank
Seventy-Three for saving my life, he thought. I could ask Father to give her a present... but what would
be useful to a slave?