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

Wind soughed in the weeds. Inside him the flesh metronome went tick, tick. Life slipped away hadon by
hadon, limning every joy with a rime of grief; and he walked backward into the future, waving and crying
put "Goodbye! Good-bye! Good-bye!"

It was dark. There were only pinprick stars, a dozen at most though the sky was black as an eye's pupil.
Shivering with fear, he stood and staggered up one of the marble staircases, now littered with blocks of
stone which glowed whitely underfoot, apparently from some internal luminance, so faint it was at the
edge of the visible. He was seeing the skeleton of the world.

On the spine the view of both seas was disorienting, literally in that he became aware that the sun would
dawn in the west, and that he would have to trek east to new ground to escape the spine kings. Still it
was reassuring to see both the oceans, to straddle the high edge of the peninsula, riding the back of the
present as it snaked through past and future. He stood there for a minute, savoring the view and the bitter
bite of the wind.

Looking back down at the dark luminous ruins of Oia, he saw a figure moving up terrace after terrace,
flitting between walls and seeming at times to jump from place to place instantaneously. The figure looked
up, and its eyes gleamed like two stars in its dark face. Thel shivered and waited, knowing the figure was
coming to join him; and so it did, taking much of the night though it moved rapidly.

Finally it approached him: a man, though it was a man so slight and fluid in his movement that he seemed
androgynous, or feminine. His skin was blacker than the sky, so that his smile and the whites of his eyes
seemed disembodied above clothing that glowed like the stones of Oia, outlining his slim form. "The spine
kings are upon us," he said in a bright, friendly voice. "Sidestepping them only works for so long. If you
want to escape you'll have to move fast. I can show you the way."

"Lead on," Thel said. He knew he could trust this figure, at the same time that another part of his mind
was aware that it was a manifestation of Tinou. The intonation of the voice was the same, but it didn't
matter. This one could be trusted. "What is your name?" Thel asked, to be sure.

"I am Naousa," the figure said, and reached forward in a confidential way to touch Thel lightly on the
upper arm, a touch suasive and erotic. "This way."

He led Thel to a steep drop-off in the ridge, unlike anything Thel had seen before. Here the spine of the
peninsula planed down and away in a smooth flat incline, as if an enormous blade had shaved off the
mountain range, cutting at a hard angle down toward the beaches. Cliffs on the sides to north and south
remained, while the cut itself descended at nearly a forty-five-degree angle. The exposed stone of the cut
was as smooth as glass, and a black that somehow indicated it would be dark gray in daylight.
Descending this slippery slope would be extremely difficult on foot, but Naousa reached deep into a cleft
in the granite and pulled out two lightweight bobsleds, both a whitish color. The sleds' bottoms were
smoother than the glassy rock slope, and had no runners or steering mechanism. "You lean in the
direction you want to go," Naousa said. "The drop isn't entirely level left to right, so you have to steer a
little to keep from going over the cliffs. Just follow me, and look out for bumps." And before Thel could
nod he had jumped on his bobsled and was off.

Thel threw his sled down and sat on it, and quickly was sliding down the slope. Naousa was an obvious
dot below, cutting big slalom curves down an invisible course. The cut slope was only a couple hundred
feet wide, though it broadened as they dropped lower. Bumps and curves invisible to the eye threw Thel
left and right as he picked up speed, accelerating at what seemed an accelerating rate; he realized the
only hope for survival was to follow Naousa's every move, even if it meant going as fast as Naousa and