"Marta Randall - The View from Endless Scarp" - читать интересную книгу автора (Randall Marta)

The View from Endless
Scarp
by Marta Randall


The last ship nosed up through the thin clouds. It was still in sight when
Markowitz sprinted from the boulders and leaped about the landing field,
throwing her arms in the air, screaming, weeping, begging the ship to
return. By the time it disappeared she lay exhausted on the hot black
setdown, fingers scrabbling, muttering to herself. The departure hadn't
gone as she'd planned but the results were the same, and Markowitz,
wretched in the dirt, remained perhaps the only human being on planet.
A Peri scuttled down the hill. It stopped at the edge of the field,
hesitated, and flung a rock at her. She cursed but didn't move. The Peri
lifted its narrow snout and produced the irritating whine that was the Peri
giggle; the others tumbled past her down the hill and poured through the
abandoned settlement, grabbing and screaming and fighting over what
remained of the colony. Within an hour the town had disappeared, save
for the shattered foundations of the houses. These, too, would find their
way to the Peri villages. Markowitz didn't care. After a while the Peri left,
dragging the last of their loot behind them.
The sun moved overhead. She turned her face from it and remembered
Thompson. That absurd hysteria on the landing field: she was no better
than the rest of them. She turned her head again, both ashamed and
relieved, and stood amid a burned landscape in which nothing moved
except her shadow across the cracked earth. She foraged a meal of unripe
berries and bitter roots; the Peri hadn't dismantled the well pump, so she
sat beside it, sipping gritty water and gnawing at the roots. She filled her
wooden canteen. In mid-afternoon she left the ruins and walked to the
brink of Endless Scarp, where she sat under a dead tree, her feet dangling
over the immense drop, and waited for night to fall.
The view from Endless Scarp had once, briefly, been a view of paradise.
The Terrans had engineered rain in a place of drought, had made rivers
and lakes, had caused the earth to flower and bear fruit. Within a Peri
generation they changed the face of the world, and the Peri had changed
with it. No need to move with the migrating game, now that game stayed
year-long on the plateau, held by the abundance of food. No need to store
grains or beans, which flourished in the broad valley. No need to sow even
the minimal crops the Peri had planted during their migrations, seeding
the slapdash fields one season and returning to harvest crops the next.
Fat clouds slipped eastward from the sea, up the high slopes of the
continent, to drop rain on the angles of the Scarp and into the wide plain.
Rivers widened and deepened, the desert turned green. The small, slender
Peri added weight under their silvery coats. Terrans went to the new Peri
villages and cured the sick, set up schools, listened to Peri music and
made music of their own. The Peri laughed and capered and accepted
Terran teachings, and the Terrans smiled, knowing that in two
generations, or perhaps four, the Peri would become small, alien versions
of their benefactors. The Terrans had been given a desert world to colonize
and succeeded in making a piece of it green. They were fruitful and