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

Then the cliff laid back, and the trail led straight ahead on an incline that got less and less steep, until he
saw ahead a skyline of shattered granite, running right to left as far as he could see. The rock stood stark
against the sky. He hurried forward and suddenly he was on the crest of a ridge extending to his left and
right, and before him he saw ocean againтАФocean far below, spread out in front of him exactly as it was
behind. Surprised, he walked automatically to a point where he could see all the way down: a steep cliff,
a strip of forest, a strip of sand, the white-on-blue tapestry of breaking waves, the intense cobalt of the
sea. He stepped back and staggered a little, trying to look in every direction at once.

He was standing on the crest of a tall peninsula, which snaked through an empty ocean for as far as he
could see. It was a narrow ridge of white granite, running roughly east to west, bisecting the blue plate of
the sea and twice marring the circular line of the horizon. The ridge rose to peaks again and again, higher
perhaps in the talcum of afternoon light to the west; it also undulated back and forth, big S shapes making
a frozen sine wave. The horizon was an enormous distance away, so far away that it seemed wrong to
him, as wrong as the seaweed woman. In fact the whole prospect was fantastically strange; but there he
stood, feeling the wind rake hard over the lichen-stained ridge, watching it shove at low shrubs and tufts
of sedge.

It occurred to him that the peninsula extended all the way around the world. A big ocean world, and this
lofty ring of rock its only land: he was sure of it. It was as if it were something he remembered.



4. Beauty Is the Promise of Happiness



And the only happiness is action. So he roused himself and headed west, thinking that a bend in the
peninsula out that way might hide Kataptron Cove. The sun fell just to the right of the rock, slowing as it
fell, flattening as if reluctant to touch the horizon, breaking into bands of glowing orange light that
stretched until they were sucked down by the sea. The twilight was long, a mauve and purple half day,
and he hiked rapidly over the crest's shattered granite, which was studded with crystals of translucent
quartz. As he walked over the rough edges of stones, feeling liberty in the twisting ligaments of his ankles,
he kept an eye out for some sort of shelter for the night. The trail he had followed onto the spine had
disappeared, no doubt because the crest itself served as a broad high trail; but at one point a deep
transverse cleft had been filled at a single spot by boulders, confirming his notion that the trail still ran, and
would reappear when needed.

So he was not surprised when he came upon a low circular stone hut, next to a small pool of water. In
this area stone broke away from the bedrock in irregular plates, and a great number of these had been
gathered and stacked in rings that grew successively smaller as they got higher off the ground, until a final
large capstone topped things off. The stones had been sized and placed so precisely that it would have
been difficult to get more than a fingernail between any two of them. A short chimney made of smaller
stones protruded from one side of the roof.

Opening a wooden door in the wall opposite the chimney, he entered and found a wooden shelf circling
the interior of the wall. Next to the fireplace was a stack of kindling and logs; other than that the hut was
empty. He was without the means to start a fire, and it was fairly warm in any case, so he went back
outside and drank from the pool, then sat against the west wall to eat the last of the fisherwoman's
grunion, in the final hour of twilight. As the light leaked out of the sky it turned a deep rich blue, dark but
not quite black: and across this strangely palpable firmament the stars popped into existence, thousands