"Robert Onopa - Area Seven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Onopa Robert)

Two hours later, despite TessaтАЩs protests, I picked my way across the surface again. As they had before,
the murmurs surrounded me like the blue haze that obscured the skiff. This second deployment was
different-of course, itтАЩs always eerie stepping across alien crust, but, this time, I was gripped by the
knowledge that each note in that solemn chorus could be that of a separate being. The forms stretched to
a purple horizon. When I started to lay out a reference grid, I registered the enormity of what I saw, and
felt overwhelmed, disoriented. In a moment of panic I swung around awkwardly, looking for the skiff. I
stumbled, and fell.

Ah, no! Please let me die!

Another womanтАЩs voice. I looked around and at first saw nothing. Then I looked below my knees and
realized that I had fractured a slim trunk with my fall. Thick red quicksilver oozed from a long fracture.

тАЬForgive me,тАЭ I murmured as I pushed myself up.
Raped by troops at Montaperti, I wept hot tears.

They cut the hand that held the flag!

Drowned am I and shamed ten thousand years.

The place she had named, Montaperti, I recognized it! Now I knew what seemed familiar-a battle lost
because the arm of a guidon bearer had been hacked through by a traitor, an army of sixty thousand
slaughtered for want of direction.

She was a character from the Hell of DanteтАЩsInferno , from the first realm ofThe Divine Comedy , a
world of suffering, regret, and timeless punishment.

I know, it sounds impossible. But as I stood there, my senses alive with a clarity I had never experienced
before, I took in a landscape in which all the pieces fit: the segmented forms-like leafless trees in a
haunted wood-the speaking blood, the suicide victim from Montaperti. I could fix my place even more
precisely: I was apparently within the region of the Violent, in the ring of DanteтАЩsInferno reserved for
those who had violated their persons by taking their own lives. Only those sinners were punished by the
peculiar transformation I beheld before me.

IтАЩd read the poem at the academy. WeтАЩd been given a passage, and IтАЩd gotten lost in the story and
devoured the whole thing, my imagination swept away by an inspired professor.

Sputtering words and blood, the sad spirit before me described a feud between two great houses-an
innocent girl jilted, left standing at a chapel altar-the very feud that had shaped DanteтАЩs world.

I stood there transfixed, listening for time out of mind, mesmerized by the soft velvet of her voice as she
incanted the lines: the jilted girl was avenged by her brother, who murdered the groom. The groom was
avenged by the murder of the girl. The war that followed ravaged the countryside, bled generations, and
destroyed the great ancient city of Florence. Eventually her words grew quiet and I recognized that the
broken breathing I was listening to was my own. When I looked, the fracture had all but healed.

I checked my com status: all the shipтАЩs channels were lit like holiday decorations. Without thinking, I had
cut myself off from Tessa again-but what could I tell her?