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

One day to escape it Thel and the swimmer walked down the staircase trail that switchbacked
precipitously to the sea. On the way they passed grown-over foundations, and roofless walls rilled with
weeds: vestiges of earlier Oias, shaken by earthquakes into the sea. On the dock below some of the
sorcerers stood talking to the sea lions, taking their bloody catch and pouring tankards of the liquor down
their throats. Even their vilest imprecations couldn't keep a flock of gulls away, and the gulls wheeled
overhead crying madly until the barking sea lions breached far into the air, thick sleek sluglike bodies
twisting adroitly as they snagged birds and crushed them in their small powerful mouths. Eventually the
gulls departed and the lions swam off, a wrack of feathered corpses left on the groundswell. After they
were gone, Thel and the swimmer shed their garments and dove in. Underwater Thel became instantly
afraid, but the sight of the swimmer stroking downward was somehow familiar, and strangely reassuring.
He stayed under for as long as he could hold his breath, and then joined her in bodysurfing the
groundswells that rose up to strike the cliffs. As the two rode the waves they remained completely inside
the water, surfing as the sea lions did, and they were drawn swiftly forward in the wave until they ducked
down and out to avoid crashing into the cliff or the dock. During these rides, slung through the water by
two curves of space-time rushing across each other, Thel would look over at the swimmer's long naked
body and feel his own flowing in the water, until it was hard to hold his breath, not because he was
winded but because he needed to shout for joy.

When they pulled themselves back onto the worn stones of the dock, Tinou was there, except now he
was a woman, laughing in a contralto at their expressions as she stripped and dove in; her face was
clearly Tinou's, unmistakable despite the fact that it was slimmer, more feminineтАФyet clearly not a sister
or twin, no, nothing but Tinou himself, shape-changed into a svelte female form. Thel and the swimmer
looked at each other, baffled by this transformation; and halfway through the long climb up the stairs
Tinou caught up with them, a man again, coquettishly embracing first the swimmer and then Thel (slim wet
arms quick around his shoulders), and then laughing uproariously at their expressions.

That sunset he led them and the facewomen down into the ruins of the previous village. Here broken
buildings had dropped their barrel roofs onto their floors, and worn splintered sticks of old furniture still
stuck out between the bowed bricks. Other sorcerers set lanterns in a circle around what appeared to be
an abandoned plaza, smaller even than the one above, and in the long lavender dusk more of the
sorcerers gathered, somber for once and drinking hard. In the sky above a windhover caught the last
rays of the sun, a white kestrel turned pink by the sunset, fluttering its wings in the rapid complex pattern
that allows it to stay fixed in the air. Tinou took the stolen mirror from his bag and set it on a short
wooden stand, on the eastern edge of the circle the sorcerers made. Against the starry east it was a circle
of pure pink sheen. When Tinou sat down the circle of seated sorcerers was complete, and they began to
sing, their faces upturned to the windhover riding the last rays of the sun. The light leaked out of the sky
and the wind riffled the enormous space of dusk and the sea, and Thel, surprising himself, feeling the old
compulsion, said "As you can change your shape, and bend the world to serve you, perhaps you can tell
me how this world came to be the way it is."

They all stared at him. "We have only a story," Tinou said finally in a kind tone, "just like anyone else."

Another voice took over, that of an old woman; but it was impossible to pick out the speaker from the
circle of faces. "The universe burst from a bubble the size of an eye, some fifteen billion years ago, and it
has been flying apart ever since. It will achieve its maximum reach outward in our lifetimes, and fall back
into that eye of density which is God's eye, and then all will begin again, just as it was the time before,
and the time before that, eternally. So that every breath that you take has occurred in just that way an
infinity of times, and all of us are but statues in time to the eye of God."

"As for this world," said the voice of an old man, a cold, hard voice, "this road of mountain across an