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

The,corral mistress said as he leaped off, "Ride these until you come to the broughтАФthey can take you
no further. Set them free and they will return to us. They know to hide from the spine kings."

"Thanks for your help," Thel said.

One of the smallest visible eyefaces grinned. "With what you are carrying," it said in a small voice, "we
want you as far away as possible when the spine kings arrive."

"Ah."

That night they built a massive bonfire, and when the flames were leaping as high as the treetops and
higher, the eldest three facewomen brought the telescope into the clearing and put it on a portable stand,
and stood Thel next to the fire, and pointed the glass at him and looked at him through it. Feeling
scorched at the back of his neck, he looked into the lens at the leader's face. She had the telescope
placed against her eyeface, and in the little curved circle of glass he saw two eyes, blinking as they
observed him: her smallest face, no doubt, too small for the naked eye to see. So there was an end to the
recession after all, he thought. The ultimate leader of the face-women, perhaps; and she said in a squeak,
"Stand still. Don't blink so much. Look straight into the glass." He did as he was told, almost laughing
because it felt like a kind of eye examination. "How far back can you see?" he asked. The bonfire pushed
roasted air past him.

"To your birth," the high voice shrilled. "You have been through the mirror and back. You are not from
this world. You fell into this world, one night, into the ocean with the seahorses."

"Before that?" Thel asked, finding it suddenly hard to breathe. The clothes on his back were hot.

"A man in a bubble, flying through the stars. Others like you and not like you. When you were a child,
you lived by a lake. The lake was circular and had high cliffs surrounding it. One day you tried to climb
the steepest cliff, and fell. You hit the water feet first and survived the impact, plunging deep. The water
of the lake was notoriously deep and so when your feet hit a submerged outcropping of the cliff you were
astonished, and in that state of panic these moments of your future came to you, intense as any memory,
for every vision is a memory, and every memory a vision of a world that never existed until called up in
the mind. You saw then your immersion in our ocean, your step through the mirror, your stand before our
glass, the fire behind you, all of it seen in that instant. Remember?"

Falling, water in his eyes, the sudden heat at his back. "Yes," Thel said, wondering, looking within
frantically to see all he could of that lost lake, his boyhood, his parents, the cat leaping from the table onto
the dog, the old man who loved the cloudsтАФ

"Everything which we really are and never quite live," the little voice said, and the whole thing snatched
itself away from him and he was only aware of the heat on his back and his hair curling. He walked away,
out of the telescope's view and into the purple night, feeling his back radiate against the wet salty air. The
face of his motherтАФhe snatched at it, lost it. Dune grass flowing like seaweed, rustling against the
chewing sound of waves: clouds drifting through the stars. Never to be in anything but the present,
trapped in the moment which is always receding, never ours to have and holdтАФthe swimmer came out
after him and found him, and he collapsed onto the sand, sat there with an arm around her strong thigh. "I
want to be a stone," he said, "a stone man lying on the beach forever, never to think, never to feel the
future sifting through me. I want to be a stone."
"It's the same for them," she said.