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

Then another wave caught them and rolled them back down to the sea; the tide was rising and they
would have perished, but the cords of a thrown net stopped them short, and they were hauled back and
dumped closer to the fire, which hissed and sizzled. The children were laughing.

Later, fighting unconsciousness, he lifted the great stone at the end of his neck. The fire had died, the
moon sat on the beach. He looked at the woman beside him. She lay on her stomach, one knee to the
side. Dry sand stuck to her skin and the moonlight reflecting from her was gritty; it sparkled as she
breathed. Powerful thighs met in a rounded muscly bottom, which curved the light into the dip of her
lower back. Her upper back was broad, her spine in a deep trough of muscle, her shoulders rangy, her
biceps thick. Short-cropped hair, dark under the moon's glaze, curled tight to her head; and the profile
glimpsed over one shoulder was straight-nosed and somehow classical: a swimmer, he thought as his
head fell back, with the big chest and smooth hard muscling of a sponge diver, or a sea goddess,
something from the myths of a world he couldn't remember.

Then her arm shifted out, and her hand came to rest against his flank, and the feel of her coursed all
through him: a short, sharp shock. He caught his breath and found he was sitting up facing her, her palm
both cool and warm against his side. He watched her catch the moon on her skin and fling it away.



2. Sea Wrack



When he woke in the morning, the woman was gone. The sun burned just over the water. He lay on a
crumbling sand cliff, the high mark of the previous tide's assault on the beach. With his head resting on
one ear, he saw a wet slick foam-flecked strand of silvery brown, and the sea; resting on the other, he
saw a lumpy expanse of blond beach, dotted with driftwood. Behind the beach was a forest, which rose
steeply to a very tall cliff of white stone; its top edge made a brilliant border with the deep blue sky
above.

He lifted his head and noticed that the sand cliff under him was a tiny model of the granite cliff standing
over the forestтАФa transient replica, already falling into the sea. But then again the immense rock cliff was
also falling into the sea, the forest its beach, the beach its strand. It repeated the little sand cliff's
dissolution on a scale of time so much vaster that the idea of it made him dizzy. The tide ebbs and the
stars die.

On the wet strand a troop of birds ran back and forth. They seemed a kind of sandpiper, except their
feathers were a dark, metallic red. They stabbed away at dead grunion rolling in the wrack, and then
dashed madly up the strand chased by waves, their stick legs pumping over blurred reflections of
themselves. They made one of these frantic cavalry charges right under a thick white fishing line; surprised
at the sight, he raised himself up on his elbows and looked behind him.

A surf fisher sat on a big driftwood log. In fact there were several of them, scattered down the beach at
more or less regular intervals. The one closest to him was all in brown, an old brown woman in a baggy
coat and floppy hat, who waved briefly at him and did not stir from her log.

He stood and walked to her. Beside her a bucket stood on the sand, filled with the little silver fish from
the previous night. She gestured at the bucket, offering him some of the fish, and he saw that her hand
was a thick mass of shiny dark brown, her fingers long tubes of lighter hollow brown, with bulbs at their