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

single organism. In the trees behind the fence stood hexagonal buildings with wood walls and hide roofs.
These were arranged in circles, like their firepits or their corral.

The three facewomen ran to one of the huts and burst into it, and emerged with a small gang of other
facewomen clinging to them and shouting. When they had calmed down, Thel, the swimmer and Garth
were welcomed with a fluid formality, recursive smiles of welcome shrinking away into the infinity of the
facewomen's right eyes. It seemed to Thel that all the inhabitants of the meadow were women, but he
noticed children among them, and saw that they tended to clump in groups of three; Garth confirmed that
these were reproductive units.

Their threesome took them to what appeared to be the oldest threesome, village elders who greeted
them and thanked them for rescuing their granddaughters. Thel took the opportunity to ask how the
bonfire messengers had known they were being pursued.

"We saw the pursuers," one of the old threesome said.

Thel frowned. "How?"

They led him to the knob above the village. There in the rocks stood a short pyramid of black fitted
stone, holding up a long hollow tube carved from the same stone, set with a thick clear lens at each end.

"A telescope!" Thel said.

The old women nodded. "You know the principle?"

"Yes." Thel waited while one of them aimed the glass, then stooped to look through it. "It's powerful!"

"Yes. More powerful than that, in fact. But that is sufficient to see the spine kings."

So it was; in the pale colors of the image, swimming on the air, Thel saw antlike soldiers, tramping in a
line along the ridge. He looked over the top of the glass and saw it was pointed some halfway along the
visible peninsula. "They're far behind."

"They stopped for other business. They will be here in a few days, at their pace. They will certainly come.
We saw through the glass what you are carrying, you see. When the spine kings arrive you must not be
here. But we will provide you with horses to speed you on your way west, in thanks for helping our
daughters. And you may spend two nights here resting."

They slept in a storage hut on piles of woven blankets, feeling so luxurious that they could scarcely get
comfortable. The next day they were taken to the big meadow pasture's corral and introduced to three of
the small horses. "These are young ones," the facewoman in charge of the corral told them. "They're wild
but they have no habitsтАФ they should accept you. Here, you hold their mane and jump on." The horses's
hair was the chestnut red of certain fir trees Thel had seen back on the high spine, and their manes, long
and rough, felt exactly like handfuls of the trees' hairy, fibrous bark: indeed, looking closely at it, he
couldn't see any difference. He laughed. Then the small herd in the enclosure bolted and ran around the
inside of the fence, all in a mass, their manes and long russet hair flowing behind them as if they were
underwater, and he laughed again. "A horse is a fish made of trees," he told the startled swimmer, and
leaped on his animal and rose head pressed into the stiff rough red mane, feeling the sea wind course
over him as it had during his wild ride on the other side of the mirror. Jerking the animal's head to one
side or another influenced its direction, and pulling back on the mane slowed it, as kicking it spurred it on.