"1 The Integral Trees" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Kendy was already sending at full amplification. "Cancel voiceover," he sent.

Not for the first time, he wondered if the Smoke Ring could have proved too kindly an environment. Creatures evolved in freefall would not have human strength. Humans could be the most powerful creatures in the Smoke Ring: happy as clams in there, and about as active. Civilization develops to protect against the environment.

Or against other men. War would be a hopeful sign...

If he could know what was going on! Kendy could perturb the environment in a dozen different ways. Cast them out of Eden and see what happened. But he dared not. He didn't know enough.

Kendy waited.

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Chapter One
Quinn Tuft

GAvvING COULD HEAR ThE RUSTLING AS HIS COMPAMONS TUNneled upward. They stayed alongside the great flat wall of the trunk. Finger-thick spine branches sprouted from the trunk, divided endlessly into wire-thin branchiets, and ultimately flowered into foliage like green cotton, loosely spun to catch every stray beam of sunlight. Some light filtered through as green twilight.

Gavving tunneled through a universe of green cotton candy.

Hungry, he reached deep into the web of branchlets and pulled out a fistful of foliage. It tasted like fibrous spun sugar. It cured hunger, but what Gavving's belly wanted was meat. Even so, its taste was too fibrous . . . and the green of it was too brown, even at the edges of the tuft, where sunlight fell.

He ate it anyway and went on.

The rising howl of the wind told him he was nearly there. A minute later his head broke through into wind and sunlight.

The sunlight stabbed his eyes, still red and painful from this morning's allergy attack. It always got him in the eyes and sinuses. He squinted and turned his head, and sniffled, and waited while his eyes adjusted. Then, twitchy with anticipation, he looked up.

Gavving was fourteen years old, as measured by passings of the sun behind Voy. He had never been above Quinn Tuft until now.

The trunk went straight up, straight out from Voy. It seemed to go out forever, a vast brown wall that narrowed to a cylinder, to a dark line with a gentle westward curve to it, to a point at infinity-and the point was tipped with green. The far tuft.

A cloud of brown-tinged green dropped away below him, spreading out into the main body of the tuft. Looking east, with the wind whipping his long hair forward; Gavving could see the branch emerging from its green sheath as a half-klomter of bare wood: a slender fin.

Harp's head popped out, and his face immediately dipped again, out of the wind. Laython next, and he did the same. Gavving waited. Presently their faces lifted. Harp's face was broad, with thick bones, its brutal strength half-concealed by golden beard. Laython's long, dark face was beginning to sprout strands of black hair.

Harp called, "We can crawl around to lee of the trunk. East. Get out of this wind."

The wind blew always from the west, always at gale velocities. Laython peered windward between his fingers. He bellowed, "Negative! How would we catch anything? Any prey would come right out of the wind!"

Harp squirmed through the foliage to join Laython. Gavving shrugged and did the same. He would have liked a windbreak. . . and Harp, ten years older than Gavving and Laython, was nominRily in charge. It seldom worked out that way.

"There's nothing to catch," Harp told them. "We're here to guard the trunk. Just because there's a drought doesn't mean we can't have a flash flood. Suppose the tree brushed a pond?"

"What pond? Look around you! There's nothing near us. Voy is too close. Harp, you've said so yourself!"

"The trunk blocks half our view," Harp said mildly.

The bright spot in the sky, the sun, was drifting below the western edge of the tuft. And in that direction were no ponds, no clouds, no drifting forests . . . nothing but blue-tinged white sky split by the white line of the Smoke Ring, and on that line, a roiled knot that must be Gold.

Looking up, out, he saw more of nothing . . . faraway streamers of cloud shaping a whorl of storm . . . a glinting fleck that might indeed have been a pond, but it seemed even more distant than the green tip of the integral tree. There would be no flood.