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

Once their ridge road narrowed, and big blocky towers of pink granite stood in their way. The trail
reappeared then, on the sunny southern slope, and they followed it along a contoured traverse below the
boulders, passing small pools that looked hacked into the rock. Half a day of this and they had passed
the sharp peaks and were back on the ridge, looking ahead down its back as it snaked through the blue
ocean. "How long is this peninsula?" Thel asked, but they only stared at him.

Every morning at sunrise Julo ordered young Garth to provide a shoulder apple for Thel's consumption,
and in the absence of any other food Thel accepted it and ate hungrily. He saw no more hallucinations,
but each time experienced a sudden flush of pinkness in his vision, and felt the bitter tang of the taste to
his bones. His right shoulder began to ache as he lay down to sleep. He ignored it and hiked on. He
noticed that on cloudy days his companions hiked more slowly, and that when they stopped by pools to
rest on those days, they took off their boots and stuck their feet between cracks in the rock, looking
weary and relaxed.

Some days later the peninsula took a broad curve to the north, and for the first time the sun set on the
south side of it. They stopped at a hut set on a particularly high knob on the ridge, and Thel looked
around at the peninsula, splitting the ocean all the way to the distant horizon. It was a big world, no doubt
of it; and the days and nights were much longer than what he had been used to, he was sure. He grew
tired at midday, and often woke for a time in the middle of the long nights. "It doesn't make sense," he
said to Garth, waving, perplexed at the mountainous mound zigzagging across the sea. "There isn't any
geological process that could create a feature like this."

This was said almost in jest, given the other more important mysteries of his existence. But Garth stared
at him, eyes feverish. He was lying exhausted, his feet deep in a crack; seeing this in the evenings Thel
always resolved not to eat, and every morning he awoke too ravenous to refuse. Now, as if to pay Garth
back with conversation, he added, "Land floats like wood, thick cakes of it drifting on slow currents of
melted rock below, and a peninsula like this, as tall as this ... I suppose it could be a mid-oceanic ridge,
but in that case it would be volcanic, and this is all granite. I don't understand."

Garth said, "It's here, so it must be possible."

Thel laughed. "The basis of your world's philosophy. You didn't tell me you were a philosopher."

Garth smiled bitterly, "Live like me and you too will become one. Maybe it's happening already, eh?
Maybe before you swam ashore you didn't concern yourself with questions like that."

"No," Thel said, considering it. "I was always curious. I think." And to Garth's laugh: "So it feels, you see.
Perhaps not everything is gone." It seemed possible that the questions came from the shattered side of his
mind, from some past self he couldn't recall but which shaped his thinking anyway. "Perhaps I studied
rock."

At sunset the wind tended to die, just as the sunrise quickened it; now it slackened. Perhaps I have died
like the wind, he thought; perhaps the only thing that survives after death are the questions, or the habit of
questioning.

The two of them watched the sun sink, just to the left of the bump of the spine on the horizon. "It's as if
it's a river in reverse," Thel said. "If a deep river ran across a desert land, and then you reversed the
landscape, water and earth, you would get something that looked like this."

"The earth river," Garth said. "The priests of the bird-folk call it that."