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

ends. Like tubes of seaweed. And her coat was a brown frond of kelp, and her face a wrinkled brown
bulb, popped by the slit of her mouth; and her eyes were polyps, smooth and wet.

An animated bundle of seaweed. He knew this was wrong, but there she sat, and the sun was bright and
it was hard to think. Many things inside his head had broken or gone away. He felt no particular emotion.
He sat on the sand beside her fishing pole, trying to think. There was a thick tendril that fell from her
lower back to her driftwood log, attaching her to it.

He found he was puzzled. "Were you here last night?" he croaked.

The old woman cackled. "A wild one. The stars fell and the fish tried to become birds again. Spring." She
had a wet hissing voice, a strange accent. But it was his language, or a language he knew. He couldn't
decide if he knew any others or not.

She gestured again at her bucket, repeating her offer. Noticing suddenly the pangs of his hunger, he took
a few grunion from the bucket and swallowed them.

When he had finished he said, "Where is the woman who washed up with me?"

She jerked a thumb at the forest behind them. "Sold to the spine kings."

"Sold?"

"They took her, but they gave us some hooks."

He looked up at the stone cliff above the trees, and she nodded.

"Up there, yes. But they'll take her on to Kataptron Cove."

"Why not me?"

"They didn't want you."

A child ran down the beach toward them, stepping on the edge of the sand cliff and collapsing it with her
passage. She too wore a baggy frond coat and a floppy hat. He noticed that each of the seated surf
fishers had a child running about in its area. Buckets sat on the sand like discarded party hats. For a long
time he sat and watched the child approach. It was hard to think. The sunlight hurt his eyes.

"Who am I?" he said.

"You can't expect me to tell you that," the fisherwoman said.

"No." He shook his head. "But I ... I don't know who I am."

"We say, The fish knows it's a fish when we yank it into the air."

He got to his feet, laughed oddly, waited for the blood to return to his head. "Perhaps I'm a fish, then. But
. . . I don't know what's happened to me. I don't know what happened."

"Whatever happened, you're here." She shrugged and began to reel in her line. "It's now that matters, we