"Larry Niven - The Integral Trees (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

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.
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,


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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!"