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

Full day came again as Oshatsh rose from the misty edge of Shadow above, this time on his side of the
interforest. His feelings of irritation at having to use some of his time to rectify someone elseтАЩs screw-up
subsided. This expedition had all the makings of a minor adventure and a distraction to keep his mind off
his failed marriage. HeтАЩd fled his loss, but it followed him in his mind. What had he done so wrong for
Kita to discard him like so much excess baggage after sixty-some years?

Stop this, he told himself. Look around you and get your mind on the forest. The brilliant sunlit mountain
of green crept up from Haze as if it was growing toward Shadow while he watched, too big to
comprehend at a glance. But he knew that under it sat one of the largest volcanoes ever found; the inner
pole shield was over twice the linear dimensions of Olympus Mons and the enveloping forest was
likewise monstrous. It grew up from the volcano out through the L1 point and spilled down onto the
surface of Shadow, a huge hollow tube of long hollow trees and alien vines that bridged the 250
kilometers or so between the twin planets. Even at the edge, the largest "trees" jutted more than a
kilometer above the volcanic ash soil.

The biology and structure of these trees, Akil knew, had little in common with trees on Earth, but "tree"
was what they looked like and "tree" was what they were called. At ground level, they stood an average
of almost a hundred meters apart, like the pillars of some gargantuan temple. The biggest of them resisted
even lava flows, and scans showed that some of them extended down through a billion yearsтАЩ worth of
built-up rock.
Black, pyramidal mushroom-equivalents jutted two and three meters up from the forest floor reeking
both fetid and sweet. Like everything on Haze and Shadow, except where an eruption, storm, or recent
impact had caused a kill, it seemed to be a climax forest, or even more than that, a collage of living fossils
some of which might be older than multicellular life on Earth.

The trees frequently hosted vines of comparable scale, which apparently did them no harm. Beams of
light lanced through the mists of the upper canopy. An eerily ape-like pseudosimian cavorted in the vines
far above them. Shape prejudice made them seem like relatives, but the consensus was that they were
less intelligent than, say, terrestrial opossums.

"Damnedest thing you ever saw, isnтАЩt it?" Marianne said, coming up behind him. "Ready?"

"Ready," he replied.

"Grab a walking stick." She gestured to a stand of "beetle plants," whose overlapping iridescent leaves
had reminded someone of beetle wing covers.

"Walking sticks? Marianne, itтАЩs only a tenth of a gravity up here and these packs mass less than four
kilos!"

"Which means a lot less weight to steady you and less friction to stop youтАУthough your momentum is as
much as ever. We need the balance aid. Also theyтАЩre useful for clearing plants away and avoiding close
encounters with Hazing life of the slobbering kind. They canтАЩt eat us, but they donтАЩt all know that. We
canтАЩt use anything technological but our com electronics in here. But what we can have is a stick. Take
one."

Too warm and uncomfortable to argue, Akil just nodded and pulled the stiff leaves off what seemed a
suitable staff, though with more effort than heтАЩd have guessed. What was left reminded him of bamboo.

Marianne led, bounding off toward the tree line. He followed.