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

upon thousands of them, from bright disks that might have been nearby planets to dots so faint that he
could only see them by looking slightly to the side. Eventually the sky was packed with stars, so densely
that they defined perfectly the dome of sky; and frightened him. "Where I come from there are not so
many stars," he said shakily to the hut, and then felt acutely his solitude, and the emptinesses inside his
mind, the black membranes he could not penetrate. He retreated into the hut. After a long time lying on
the hard wooden shelf, he fell asleep.
Sometime before dawn he was awakened by a crowd of folk banging in the doorway. They held him
down and searched under his skirt. They had broad hard hands. Cloaks made of small leaves sewn
together clicked in the dark, and it smelled like oranges.

"Are you the spine kings?" he asked, drunk with sleep.

They laughed, an airy sound. One said, "If we were you'd be strangled with your own guts by now."

"Or tossed down the cliff."

The first voice said, "Or both. The spine kings' hello."

They all had lumps on their left shoulders, irregular dark masses that looked like shrubs. They took him
out of the hut, and under the sea-colored sky he saw that the lumps were in fact shrubsтАФminiature fruit
trees, it appeared, growing out of their left shoulders. The fruits were fragrant and still reminded him of
oranges, although the smell had been altered by the salt tang, made more bitter. Round fruit, in any case,
of a washed-out color that in better light might have been pale green.

The members of this group arranged themselves in a circle facing inward, took off their leaf cloaks and
sat down. He sat in the circle between two of them, glancing at the shoulder tree to his right. It definitely
grew directly out of the creature's skinтАФthe gnarled little roots dove into the flesh just as a wart would,
leaving an overgrown fissure between bark and skin.

With a jerk he looked away. It was almost dawn, and the treefolk began singing a low monophonic
chant, in a language he didn't recognize. The sky brightened to its day blue, slightly thickened by the sun's
absence, and the wind suddenly picked up, as if a door had banged open somewhereтАФa cool fresh
breeze, peeling over the spine in the same moment that the sun pricked the distant gray line of the
horizon, a green point stretching to a line of hot yellow and then a band of white fire, throwing the sea's
surface into shadow and revealing a scree of low diaphanous cloud. Before the sun had detached itself
from the sea each member of the circle had plucked a fruit from the shoulder of the person on their right,
and when the sun was clear and the horizon sinking rapidly away from it, they ate. Their bites caused a
faint crystalline ringing, and the odor of bitter oranges was strong. He felt his stomach muscles contract,
and saliva ran down his throat. The celebrant nearest the sun glanced at him and said, "Treeless here will
be hungry."

He almost nodded, but held himself still.

"What's your name?" the celebrant asked. He had been the first speaker in the hut.

"I don't know."

"No?" The creature considered it. "Treeless will be good enough, then. In our naming language, that is
Thel."