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

13. Garth's Apples



The following morning they woke with the dawn and the facewomen led them to their horses and waved
farewell as they rode off. The horses were exuberant with running and galloped over the dunes waving
their heads from side to side like blind things, eating the air and snapping at their riders if they were
interfered with. So they hung on and rode: Garth's horse led, the swimmer's brought up the rear. Thick
white thunderheads grew over the water to the south, and the colors of everything in the long morning
light were richer than they remembered them being, the water a dark glassy blue outside jade green
shallows, the foam on the breakers as white as the clouds, the dune grass subtle dusty greens, the red
barky hair of their horses an irresistible magnet for the eye. The horses ran along the beach until midday,
then cantered up onto the dunes and browsed on the sparse grass. The three riders dismounted stiffly and
hobbled them, then walked down to the beach to forage for beach food to supplement the little the
facewomen had been able to give them. They ate on the beach, returned to the horses and slept, then in
the midafternoon rode again. They traveled so much faster than they could have on foot that it was hard
to grasp: they were already far from the facewomen's meadow, and the horses ran on tirelessly through
the long glary stretches of late afternoon, until at sunset they trotted to a halt and stood in a
wind-protected dip between two dunes, browsing easily through the mauve dusk.

They rode like that for days. Each day the peninsula became lower, narrower, more stripped of life. The
thick mats of dune grass reduced to occasional patches, the tufts of grass as sparse as the hair on a
balding man. Each tuft had been blown in every direction by the winds, creating a perfect circle of
smoothed hard sand around it, deepest at the outer edge; the dunes became geometrical worksheets,
sine waves covered with circles. One sunset walking in this deeply patterned sand Thel looked down at a
tuft of grass and the perfect circle around it, and thought That is your life: a stalk of living stuff blown in
every direction, leaving a brief pattern in sand.

They had emptied the facewomen's bags of food, and went hungry as the beach provided less and less.
One morning Garth plucked two of the fruit from his shoulder tree and offered them to Thel and the
swimmer. "I can eat grass," he told them. "More grass, more fruit. Really. Please. We can't afford to
spend all day on the beach foraging."

Thel said, "If we stopped in the late afternoon instead of at dusk, we could forage more, and you could
eat more too." He scuffed dubiously at the tough dune grass, so sharp edged you could easily cut skin
with it. Garth also spent every evening with his feet buried in the sand; presumably more of that would
help too, but it was something Garth didn't talk about.

He did agree to the early stops, however, and so every morning after that Thel and the swimmer ate one
of his bitter electric shoulder apples, and felt the chemical tang of it course through them. It was
wonderful how well the apples satisfied their appetites, how long they could subsist on them. And Garth
ate dune grass in the evenings, and spent time with his feet buried in the sand, and got thinner; but the
apples continued to bloom on his shoulder tree, tiny fragrant white blossoms giving way to hard green
nubs, which grew quickly into edible fruit.

Then as they rode down the endless spit of the peninsula, even the grasses disappeared. They were on a
desert shore, beach on both sides of a low mound of dunes; even the horses had to be fed from Garth's
tree, and he had to spend the whole of every afternoon with his body stretched out to the sun, and his