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

"Are there any tributaries? Any lakes-turned-into-islands?"

"I've never seen any."

The air darkened and the salt air grew chill. Garth was breathing deeply, about to fall asleep, when he
said in a voice not his, a voice pleasant but at the same time chilling: "Through mirrors we see things right
way round at last."

In the days that followed, this image of a landscape in reverse haunted Thel, though in the end it explained
nothing. The stony spine continued to split the water, and it got taller, the south side becoming as steep as
the north again. In places they walked on a strip of level granite no wider than a person, and on each side
the cliffs plunged some five thousand feet into white foam tapestries that shifted back and forth over deep
water, as if something below the blue were lightly breathing: it disturbed one's balance to look down at it,
and though the strip was wide enough to walk on comfortably, the sheer airiness of it gave Thel vertigo.
Garth walked over it with a pinched expression, and Julo laughed at him, cuffed him hard so that he had
to go to his knees to avoid falling over the side; then Julo forced him to walk backwards, which served
the others as amusement.

Eventually the north side grew less steep, laying out until the peninsula was wider than ever. In this section
a hot white cliff faced south, a cool forested slope faced north. On the north slope were scattered stands
of enormous evergreens, the tallest trees three or four hundred feet high. One of these giants stood on a
ledge just below the crest, and had grown up above the ridge, where the winds had flattened it so that its
branches grew horizontally in all directions, some laying over the ridge, others fanning out into the air over
the beach and the sea far below.

The treefolk greeted this flat-topped giant as an ancestor, and clambered out over the horizontal
branches to the tree's mighty trunk, over it, and out the other side. They ended up on three or four
lightning-blasted gnarly branches, ten feet wide and so solid that jumping up and down would not move
them, though the whole tree swayed gently in a fitful west wind. Big shallow circular depressions had
been cut into the tops of these branches, and the exposed wood had been polished till it gleamed.

They spent the night in these open-roofed rooms, under the star-flooded sky. By starlight Thel looked at
the wood by his head and saw the grain of centuries of growth exposed. The peninsula had been here for
thousands of years, millions of yearsтАФboth the plant life and the erosion of the granite showed that. But
how had it begun? "When you talk among yourselves about the spine," he said to the treefolk, "do you
ever talk about where it came from? Do you have a story that explains it?"

Julo was looking down into the grain of the floor beneath him, still and rapt as if he had not heard Thel;
but after a while he said, in a low voice, "We tell a story about it. Traveling in silent majesty along their
ordered ways, the gods tree and snake were lovers in the time without time. But they fell into time, and
snake saw a vision of a lover as mobile as he, and he chased round the sky until he saw the vision was his
own tail. He bit the tail in anger and began to bleed, and his blood flowed out into a single great drop,
bound by the circle his long body made. He died of the loss, and tree climbed on his back and drove her
roots deep into his body, trying to feed his blood into him, trying to bring him back to life, and all her
acorns dropped and grew to join in the attempt. And here we are, accidents of her effort, trying to help
her as we can, and some day the snake will live again, and we will all sail off among the stars, traveling in
silent majesty."

"Ah," Thel said. And then: "I see."