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

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.
Gavving had been six years old when the last flood came. He remembered terror, panic,
frantic haste. The tribe had bufrowed east along the branch, to huddle in the thin foliage where
the tuft tapered into bare wood. He remembered a roar that drowned the wind, and the mass of the
branch itself shuddering endlessly. Gavving's father and two apprentice hunters hadn't been warned
in time. They had been washed into the sky.
Laython started off around the trunk, but in the windward direction.
He was half out of the foliage, his long arms pulling him against the wind. Harp followed. Harp
had given in, as usual. Gavving snorted and moved to join them.
It was tiring. Harp must have hated it. He was using claw sandals, but he must have
suffered, even so. Harp had a good brain and a facile tongue, but he was a dwarf~ His torso was
short and burly; his muscular arms and legs had no reach, and his toes were mere decoration. He
stood less than two meters tall. The Grad had once told Gavving, "Harp looks like the pictures of
the Founders in the log. We all looked like that once."
Harp grinned back at him, though he was puffing. "We'll get you some claw sandals when
you're older."
Laython grinned too, superciliously, and sprinted ahead of them both. He didn't have to
say anything. Claw sandals would only have hampered his long, prehensile toes.
Night had cut the ffluniin~tion in halL Seeing was easier, with the sunglare around on the
other side of Voy. The trunk was a great brown wall three klomters in circumference. Gavving
looked up once and was disheartened at their lack of progress. Thereafter he kept his head bent to
the wind, clawing his way across the green cotton, until he heard Laython yell.
"Dinner!"
A quivering black speck, a point to port of windward. Laython said, "Can't tell what it
is."
Harp said, "It's trying to miss. Looks big."
"It'll go around the other side! Come on!"
They crawled, fast. The quivering dot came closer. It was long and narrow and moving tail-
first. The great translucent fin blurred with speed as it tried to win clear of the trunk. The
slender torso was slowly rotating.
The head came in view. Two eyes glittered behind the beak, one hundred and twenty degrees
apart.
"Swordbird," Harp decided. He stopped moving.
Laython called, "Harp, what are you doing?"
"Nobody in his right mind goes after a swordbird."
"It's still meati And it's probably starving too, this far in!"