"Ian R. MaCleod - Verglas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

IAN R. MacLEOD - Verglas
The first week after Marion and the kids left I kept busy around the base, clearing tunnels, tidying up their
chambers, storing things away, taking in great gulps of memory. But even then I felt restless. I spent a long
afternoon digging their graves by hand; trying to lose myself in working up a sweat, whacking the hot blade of
the shovel through gray-tufted tundra into the course peat below. Then I went to seal up their bodies for the
last time. They looked so beautiful lying inside their half-open sleepsuits with the stillfield showing through
their veins in tiny threads of gold. I kissed Marion's mouth and her cool white breasts. I touched the bruise
that still showed on Robbie's forehead from the day he fell chasing the silver-backed pseudocrabs soon after
we landed. I drew my fingers through Sarah's pale yellow hair. There was a faint but palpable sense that, even
though it was so slow as to be undetectable, they were still breathing. And despite all I knew and everything
that we'd agreed, I felt that something of my family remained with me here. It was hard to believe that the
decay of their bodies in Korai's acidic soil wouldn't destroy a lingering fragment. Not that I wanted to change
things or go back, not that I regretted the decision we'd jointly made, but I knew that I couldn't bury them.

Next day as I walked out across the tundra to prepare the last quester for its journey across the mountains to
explore Korai's far southern peninsula, I nearly stumbled into one of the long holes I'd cut. I spent that
afternoon refilling all three, shoveling and then patting down and re-compacting the ground until all that was
left was a faint disturbance of the sod that the growth of the slow-gathering summer would obliterate.

That evening, as always, I laid out new slabs of meat along the fissured table of rock at the east end of the
canyon, steaming hot from the processor so they'd show up well on infra red. I'd genuinely expected Marion,
Robbie and Sarah to return here the first few nights after they'd left. But with a week gone I'd decided that
their staying away was really a positive sign; it showed they were managing to hunt and feed. By now I was
just laying out the meat from habit. This deep and narrow rift between the mountains made a poor feeding
ground, and Marion had always said that it made sense for them to start as they meant to go on, to get as far
away as they could from their human bodies.

I sat on a rock with my powerpack set high to keep warm as the wind from the vast eastern range poured
down around me in the blue gathering dark, waiting without much hope for Marion and Sarah and Robbie and
thinking of the way things had been, enjoying the luxury of an undefined and unjustified melancholy. After all,
it wasn't as though I was really losing them any more than I was losing myself. But there was Marion tossing
Sarah in the clear spray of a forest rockpool back on Earth, her belly shining taught with Robbie who was yet
to be born. And there was the night that we decided to make him, and the feel of snow and cold marvelous
starlight pouring down through the trees. Yes, even then, Marion had loved the mountains.

Korai's sun Deres, long set from my sight, had painted the tips of the furthest mountains red when I sensed
the gray beat of wings. I stood up quickly, feeling reality tingle around me once more, the sharpness of the
wind breaking through the mingled taste of love and snow on Marion's skin. Those days were gone now. I was
here on this planet and my ears and eyes were telling me that three shapes were drifting down from the
grainy white cliffs that dropped from a desolate plateau. They seemed to shift and dance at the very edge of
sight, drifting half-shadows or mere flakes of soot swirling on the sparse thermals. Scale is nothing here. As I
caught the beat of pinions and the near-ultrasonic keening--part sonar, part language -there came, hazy and
unbidden, the image of Sarah on a white beach by the blue ocean, her hair falling in salt tangles as she
stooped along the shore to collect fishbones and shells. I pushed it away, an unwanted comparison, and
concentrated on those shapes in the blackening sky, clearer to me now against the red-edged mountains,
and real. One large, and two smaller. Although I still knew little enough about species identifers, it had to be
Marion, Robhie, Sarah. They were the only ones.

I ran across the turf, trying to pull everything in, every sound and every sense, greedy to hold this moment --
knowing that it would be soon gone. They swept over me once. Marion's larger shape darkened the already