"Kim Stanley Robinson - A Short, Sharp Shock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

She only shook he head. She remembered the night on the beach; beyond that she was unable to say.
She concentrated her gaze on her long feet, which seemed to have trouble negotiating the rock, and she
rarely looked at him. He didn't mind. It was a comfort to be walking with her and to know that someone
shared the mystery of his arrival on the peninsula. She was a fellow exile, moving like a dancer caught in
heavier gravity than she was used to, and it was a pleasure just to watch her as the sun roasted her
brown hair white at the tips, and burned her pale skin red-brown. Often Aspects of her reminded Thel of
that first night: the set of her rangy shoulders, the profile of her long nose. With speech or without, she
reassured him.

And GarthтАФGarth too was an exile, a new one, and he hiked with them but in himself, skittish,
distracted, sad. Thel hiked with him as well, and told him more stories of the rock under their feet, and
Garth nodded to show he was listening; but he wasn't entirely there. The leaves on his little tree drooped,
as if they needed watering.

So they moved westward, and the peninsula got steep and narrow again, the granite as hard as iron and a
gray near black, flecked with rose quartz nodules. The drop-offs on both sides became so extreme that
they could see nothing but a short curved slope of rock, and then ocean, a few thousand feet below.
Tinou told them that here the walls of the sea cliffs were concave, so that they walked on a tube of rock
that rested on a thin vertical sheet of stone, layered like an onion. "Exfoliating granite," Thel said. Tinou
nodded, interested, and went on to say that in places the two cliffsides had fallen away to nothing, so that
they were walking on arches over open holes, called the Serpent's Gates. "If you were on the tide trail,
you could climb up into them and sit under a giant rainbow of stone, the wind howling through the hole."

Instead they tramped a trail set right down the edge of a fishback ridge. In places the trail had been
hacked waist-deep into the dense dark rock, to give some protection, from falls. Every day Tinou said
they were getting close to his village, and to support the claim (for somehow his cheerful assurances
made Thel doubt him), the trail changed under their feet, shifting imperceptibly from barely touched
broken rock to a loose riprap, and then to cobblestones set in rings of concentric overlapping arcs, and
finally, early one morning shortly after they started. off, to a smoothly laid mosaic, made of small polished
segments of the rose quartz. Longer swirls of dark hornblende were set into this pink road, forming
letters in a cursive alphabet, and Tinou sang out the words they spelled in a jubilant tenor, the "Song of
Mystic Arrival in Oia" as he explained, fluid syllables like the sound of a beach stream's highest gurgling.
At one point for their benefit he sang in the language they all shared:



We walk the edge of pain and death
And carve in waves our only hearth
And nothing ever brings us home
But something makes us want to climb:
The sight of water cut like stone
A village hanging in the sky.
A village hanging in the sky
And nothing ever brings us home
But something makes us, climb.


And climb they did, all that long day, until they came over a rise in the ridge, and there facing the southern
sea, tucked in a steep scoop in the top of the cliff, was a cluster of whitewashed blocky buildings, lined in
tight rows so that the narrow lanes were protected from the wind. Terrace after terrace cut the in-curved