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

The expected downpour didn't happen, although the drips came faster and faster, merging into trickling
cascades in places. The roofтАФno generated field, just leaves, bark, and twigsтАФdidn't leak. His panic
subsiding slowly, Joaquin squatted beside his equipment, watching the rainforest channel the water neatly
into leaves, crevices, whorls of petals. A clump of fat red blossoms bloomed at the edge of the platform.
The curled waxy leaves had filled like tubular goblets. Crystal water ran over and trickled down onto the
clumps of gray-green moss that grew at the base.

"The frogs will lay their eggs in the water in the leaves and hollow stems." Zlia appeared beside him.
"Listen! Hear them singing? You can hear the new voices. Ten rains ago, there were too few to hear.
They are growing." Her face was full of a clear, unadulterated joyтАФlike a child's joyтАФuncomplicated by
conditions or confusions. Rain beaded her dark hair like bits of diamond and she shook herself like a
dog, spattering Joaquin with the warm water. He yelped, and she laughed again. "Here." She handed him
a pear-shaped green fruit. "These grow on a Plantation tree. They only want the sap. They don't care
what grows up here, so the trees suit themselves."

Joaquin took a cautious bite. The skin was leathery, not crisp like the skin of the tree-grown apples that
his father always kept in a bowl on his desk. It was soft, and so was the flesh of the fruitтАФwhich was
sweet, with a not-unpleasant musky taste. He realized he was starving, wolfed the fruit in huge mouthfuls,
so that sticky juice ran down his chin and dripped onto his chest.

Zlia laughed and handed him some of the small yellow fruits that he had seen when he waked. They were
sweet enough to make him dizzy. The rain had stopped by the time he wiped his sticky hands on wet
leaves and scrubbed his face with his damp shirt.

"Are you going to turn it on?" Zlia had wandered over to his equipment, was randomly touching screens,
readouts, leads with her long, clawed fingers. "Are you going to look at the ghosts?"

"What ghosts?" He lifted her hands gently away from a touch screen. "You can mess things up, okay?"
His brain had to search for words that would convey that warning.

"The ghosts from the other worlds." She put her hands behind her back like an admonished child. "The
ones who fall through our world. I want to see them."

"They're not ghosts." He blinked down into her elfin, childlike face. "They're jumpers. Real people like us,
only from a universe a few nanoseconds ahead of ours."

"They have left their lives behind. They are ghosts." She nodded. "Show me."

"I have to set up my net first." It had taken him two days to suspend the hair-fine fabric of the sensor in
the dead land beyond the hut. Once, someone had maybe grown a garden there. Now, the Plantation
sprayed the ground every year with herbicide so that undesirable wild crosses from the genened trees
wouldn't take hold and go to seed. The dead, ocher soil had looked like a painted floor. "It's going to
take some time," he said doubtfully, staring out at the interlaced branches and gray trunks of the canopy
world. Everything gleamed with moisture, and wisps of vapor floated among the leaves. "If I string it
between branches, will animals tear it down? You knowтАФmonkeys or birds or something?"

"There are none here." Zlia's eyes gleamed with green light in the filtered sunset. "There is nothing here
that is not important to the trees or the Plantation. The Plantation has no need of monkeys or birds. The
trees like the insects, and the Plantation scientists have never been able to make the insects live or die the
way they wish. So they let the frogs remain. And the snakes to keep the frogs from becoming too many.