"Mary Rosenblum - Jumpers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenblum Mary)

Jumpers

by Mary Rosenblum

One moment he was sitting on the edge of the Novo-Brazilia Plantation in a crappy government-built hut,
his equipment stacked as crookedly as a child's blocks before him. The next instant, faceless camo-clad
figures were bursting through the doors and windows of the hut, rifles in their hands. He had spent sweaty
hours stapling that damn screening over every opening to keep the swarming jungle bugs out. Joaquin felt
a single flash of annoyance as the mesh ripped loose, and then a rifle butt hit him in the temple, exploding
annoyance and vision into meaningless shards of light.


┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖


Night. Joaquin stared at the sky. Between the starsтАФdarkness. "That's what matters," he was telling
someone. "Not the stars. We know what the stars are, how old they are, how long they'll live. No, it is
what lies between them that is the mystery." Shapes of blackness even more profound than the space
between the stars fell like a slow rain down onto a canopy of green jungle.
Jumpers.

"Look," he cried. "Look, I was right, Czenko was right. They're real!" But no one was listening or there
to see, and the falling, floating jumpers vanished.

Joaquin struggled to open his eyes. Dream, he thought hazily and winced as color assaulted his aching
head. Where? He struggled to bring that light and color into focus. Not the hut. He was lying on a mat
that felt like frayed string beneath his fingertips. Green and brown resolved into leaves above his face and
thick hanks of dark red stems strung with dozens of orange and yellow fruits. Rainforest canopy, he
thought fuzzily. But the Plantation hadn't allowed him access, so he couldn't be in there.

Memory rushed inтАФcamo-clad intruders, ripping screens, the rifle butt.

He tried to sit up, winced and groaned as pain lanced through his brain. Green twilight surrounded him,
thick with humidity, warm as spit. The strings of fruit brushed his face, filling his nostrils with the thick
scent of overripe figs. Moss padded the huge limbs all around him, studded with drooping emerald fronds
of miniature ferns.

Limbs.

Joaquin looked down тАж down тАж sudden, clammy sweat plastering his shirt to his brown skin, nausea
twisting in his belly. The huge trunk dwindled into shadow below him. Clutching the flimsy platform he lay
on, he lifted his eyes quickly as the branch seemed to tilt beneath him. More limbs radiated from the sleek
gray trunk of the enormous tree, thick enough to walk on, to sleep on. Between two adjacent branches a
platform had been built from branches, roofed with thick, leathery leaves. Familiar plastic boxes were
stacked haphazardly beneath that flimsy protection. His equipment. Irreplaceable, some of it. He
scrambled to his feet, swaying over the shadowy abyss below.

"No." That single syllable, high-pitched and resonant, startled Joaquin so that he nearly lost his balance
and fell after all.