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

say."

He considered it.

"Which way is the cove you mentioned?" he said at last.
She pointed down the beach, away from the sun. "But the beach ends, and the cliff falls straight into the
sea. It's best to climb it here."

He looked at the cliff. It would be a hard climb. He took a few more grunion from the bucket. Fellow
fish, dead of self-discovery. The seaweed woman grubbed in a dark mass of stuff in the lee of her log,
then offered him a skirt of woven seaweed. He tied it around his waist, thanked her and took off across
the beach.

"You'd better hurry," she called after him. "Kataptron Cove is a long way west, and the spine kings are
fast."



3. The Spine



The forest was thick and damp, with leaves scattered at every level, from the rotting logs embedded in
the carpet of ferns to the sunbroken ceiling of leaves overhead. Streams gurgled down the slope, but
apparently it had not rained for some time, as smaller creekbeds held only trickles; one served him as a
pebble-bottomed trail, broken by networks of exposed roots. In the cool gloom he hiked uphill, moving
from glade to glade as if from one green room to the next, each sculpted according to a different theory
of space and color. Leaves everywhere gave proof of his eye's infinite depth of field, and all was still
except for the water falling to the seaтАФand an occasional flash in his peripheral vision, birds, perhaps,
which he could never quite see.

The forest ended at the bottom of the cliff, which rose overhead like the side of an enormous continent.
Boulders taller than the trees were scattered about at the foot of the cliff. Ferns and mosses covered the
tumble of rotten granite between boulders. The cliff itself was riven by deep gullies, which were almost as
steep as the buttresses separating them. He clambered between boulders looking for a likely way up, in a
constant fine mist: far above waterfalls had broken apart, and to the left against the white rock was a
broad faint rainbow.

Just as he was concluding that he would have to scramble up one of the gullies he came on a trail going
up the side of one, beginning abruptly in the ferny talus. The trail was wide enough for two people to
walk side by side, and had been hacked out of the granite side wall of the gully, where it switchbacked
frequently. When the side wall became completely vertical, the trail wound out over the buttress to the
left and zigzagged up that steep finger of stone, in stubborn defiance of the breathtaking exposure. It was
impossible to imagine how the trail had been built, and it was also true that a break any where in the
supporting walls would have cut the trail as neatly as miles of empty air; but there were no breaks, and
the weedless gravel and polished bedrock he walked over indicated frequent use. He climbed as if on a
staircase in a dream, endlessly ascending in hairpin turns, until the forest and beach below became no
more than green and blond stripes running as far as he could see in both directions, between the
sun-beaten blue of the ocean and the sunbeaten white of the granite.