"G. David Nordley - The Forest Between the Worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nordley G. David)

The Forest Between the Worlds
by G. David Nordley
A persistent buzz against his wrist drew Akil Mateo into reality from deep sleep. "Kita?" he mumbled,
and reached beside him. Empty air. Where was she? Where was he?

As sleep faded, he found himself in a hammock of fine netting beside a hut in a clearing in a forest.
Where? Memories flooded back into consciousness. He was fifty-one light years and change from Earth
on the planet Haze and Kita was long gone.

He felt another buzz on his wrist and hit the wait-a-minute bump on his com patch; so much for sleep. He
wanted to think it was a bad dream, but seven weeks ago, as he had experienced time, heтАЩd come home
to find her things gone and a message telling him that their sixty-three-year marriage was over. HeтАЩd
jumped at a chance to head out here and put all the reminders far, far behind him. But his dreams and the
emptiness beside him were the greatest reminders of all and they followed him everywhere.

His com patch buzzed again. He shook his head, yawned and stretched. After almost forty hours in the
field, his body felt like lead in spite of the one-tenth gravity. It had better be important.

At least this was a cool day, not much over 30 Celsius, he imagined, and with just a faint but very
welcome breeze. The vast cloudy globe of Shadow, overhead, was already a waning crescent and the
upper reaches of the interforest were already lost in darkness; in less than an hour, their sun, Oshatsh,
would vanish behind it for twenty minutes. Three hours later, true night would fall. Here, between the twin
worlds, the exhausting pace of six-hour days nearly doubled.

Buzz. "Hello?"

He looked at the image on the tiny screen stuck to his wrist. The shaved head of a woman stuck out of
the tall, gently undulating low-gravity waves in the nearby lake they used as a swimming hole. The subtext
told him the call was from Marianne Jones, a biological researcher heтАЩd met a couple of standard days
ago when heтАЩd come down to the base.

"Akil Mateo?" she asked.

In her Australian accent, the last syllable of his name came out "kill" instead of "keel." He sighed.

"Ah-keel here," he said, exaggerating the pronunciation slightly. "Just woke up. What is it?"

"Sorry, but youтАЩre the only one around. Could you check Sharada FinaтАЩs hut and see if sheтАЩs there?" Her
voice sounded worried. "IтАЩve been getting no answer from her com patch for the last hour."

"Sharada Fina? The anthropologist? Rumored to be going native?"

Jones frowned. "She may be up in the forest. If so, sheтАЩs overdue."

Akil blinked. "May be? DidnтАЩt she check out?"

"Maybe through her system, but itтАЩs got a privacy block. Base ops says her com patch is still in her dome
with vital sign monitoring off. ThatтАЩs okay if sheтАЩs in her dome, but IтАЩll bet she left it there."

He automatically ran the fingers of his left hand over his com patch, feeling the discrete bumps of its few