"Vonda N. McIntyre-Fireflood" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

tone as in bright sunlight. Still, all the colors were black.
Dark breathed deeply of the cold air. It was stuffy underground, through she had not had to switch to
reducing her own oxygen. That was for deeper down, in altogether more difficult regions.
The air smelled of moss and ferns, evergreen trees, and weathered stone. But under it all was the
sulfurous volcano, and the sweet delicate fragrance of flyers.
Sinking down into the earth once more, Dark traveled on.
***


The closer Dark got to the volcano, the more jumbled and erratic grew the strata. Lava flows and land
movement, glaciers and erosion had scarred and unsettled and twisted the surface and all that lay beneath
it. Deep underground Dark encountered a tilted slab of granite, too hard for her to dig through quickly.
She followed it upward, hoping it would twist and fold back down again. But it did not, and she broke
through topsoil into the chill silence of a wilderness night. Dirt and pebbles fell away from her shoulder
armor. From the edge of the outcropping she looked out, in infrared, over her destination.
The view excited her. The tree-covered slope dropped to tumbled masses of blackened logs that
formed the first barrier against intrusion into the flyers' land. Beyond, at the base of the volcano, solidified
lava created another wasteland. The molten rock had flowed from the crater down the flank of the
mountain; near the bottom it broke into two branches which ran, one to each side, until both ended like
true rivers, in the sea. The northern shore was very close, and the pale nighttime waves lapped gently on
the dim cool beach. To the south the lava had crept through a longer sweep of forest, burning the trees in
its path and toppling those beyond its heat, for a much longer distance to the ocean. The wide solid flood
and the impenetrable wooden jumble formed a natural barricade. The flyers were exiled to their
peninsula, but they stayed there by choice. The humans had no way of containing them short of killing
them. They could take back their wings or chain them to the ground or imprison them, but they wished to
isolate the flyers, not murder them. And murder it would be if they denied the creatures flight.
The basalt streams glowed with heat retained from the day, and the volcano itself was a softly radiant
cone, sparkling here and there where upwellings of magma approached the surface. The steam rising
from the crater shone brightly, and among its clouds shadows soared in spirals along the edges of the
column. One of the shadows dived dangerously toward the ground, risking destruction, but at the last
moment it pulled up short to soar skyward again. Another followed, another, and Dark realized they
were playing a game. Entranced, she hunched on the ridge and watched the flyers play. They did not
notice her. No doubt they could see better than she, but their eyes would be too dazzled by the heat's
luminous blackness to notice an earthbound creature's armor-shielded warmth.
Sound and light burst upon her like explosions. Clearing the ridge that had concealed it, a helicopter
leaned into the air and ploughed toward her. Until this moment she had not seen or heard or sensed it. It
must have been grounded, waiting for her. Its searchlights caught and blinded her for a moment, till she
shook herself free in an almost automatic reaction and slid across the bare rock to the earth beyond. As
she plunged toward the trees the machine roared over her, its backwash blasting up a cloud of dirt and
leaves and pebbles. The 'copter screamed upward, straining to miss treetops. As it turned to chase her
down again, Dark scuttled into the woods.
She had been careless. Her fascination with the volcano and the flyers had betrayed her, for her
stillness must have convinced the humans that she was asleep or incapacitated.
Wondering if it would do any good, she burrowed into the earth. She felt the helicopter land, and then
the lighter vibrations of footsteps. The humans could find her by the same technique, amplifying the
sounds of her digging. From now on they did not even need her beacon.
She reached a boundary between bedrock and earth and followed its lessened resistance. Pausing for
a moment, she heard both movement and its echoes. She felt trapped between sounds, from above and
below. She started digging, pushing herself until her work drowned out all other noises. She did not stop
again.