"Jacqueline Lichtenberg - Dushau Trilogy 03 - Outreach" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lichtenberg Jacqueline)

of flying fortresses and spaceships, their only technological support.

Nearer the colony, high up on the cliff face, a cave had been enlarged by the Holot, the heavily pelted,
six-limbed species who seemed mammalian but didn't suckle their young. They used the cave for making
food for their infants.

Far to the southwest, the Oliat awareness picked up a storm brewing. On the plain above the cliff, shrubs
bloomed, filling the air with a sticky, irritating pollen that clogged everything, coating all exposed surfaces
with gum.

Jindigar drank in the experience of his Oliat's full global awareness, something he had lived millennia only
imagining. Now, at the very moment when he'd grasped the fringes of its possibilities, he must relinquish
it. He could, for the first time, fully appreciate the reason a Center's Oliat career ended with his Oliat.
One could easily become addicted to this and become unable to survive as an individual.

He felt the others savoring the beauty of this final union, comparing it to how they'd striven and suffered
before to garner just a fraction of the information now flowing through their multiconsciousness. Now that
they'd tasted it, they yearned to refine their focus, to know every microbe in the Cassrians' hatching
pond, every denizen of the river, every disease destroying the fish hatchery, every parasite attacking the
sprouting fieldsтАФhow all these fit into the single ecology they were building out of disparate imports and
native life forms.

But he had to curb their eagerness to explore this new awareness. He tuned the linkages closer to the
shaleiliu chord, letting them vibrate, soaking up the energy of the unheard sound. The Dissolution that he
had been so afraid of would not be at all difficult, now that he had them balanced. He worked those
linkages, one at a time, and then in pairs, tediously tuning and retuning, until he felt the wavering, deso-

lidifying shimmer that signified impending Dissolution of the linkages.
A stray thought surfaced. Now Trinarvil would not serve in his OliatтАФas she had predicted she would
one day. This whole year, everyone had regarded Krinata as just holding Trinarvil's place until she was
well enough to work Oliat. Trinarvil's prophetic gift had never failed before.

And then it happened.

A screeching, clattering wave of tiny bodies blackened the sky, coming into their sphere of awareness
from the northeast. Swiftly, the animals poured info the side of the cliff north of the settlement, into the
Holot's cave. Two Holot females emerged from the cave mouth, clicking flyers diving at their eyes and
throats. One of the women went down, sprawling at the edge of the cave mouth near the ladder.
Instantly, she was covered with a black blanket of crawling animals yammering in sudden triumph.

Jindigar abandoned the Dissolution and let the clarity of the linkages resume. //That's a hive-swarm.
We've got to stop themтАФor there won't be a Holot infant left alive.// He tore out the door, Krinata just
ahead of him, the others following, their personal concerns forgotten.

The searing sunlight blinded them through Krinata's human sensitivity, but they kept running, gradually
forming around Jindigar in the Oliat pattern, Krinata as Outreach in the lead. Seeing this, the Dushau
waiting outside for the weddings to begin parted to let them pass. Some Dushau qualified to act as
Outriders fell in around them as they caught up to a crowd of Dushau heading for the north gate.

The sky was aswarm with the flowing mosaic of tiny bodies moving as if commanded by one brain.