"Sheri S. Tepper - Jinian Stareye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

Struggling gray forms on the floor, one or two. I went toward them, trying to feel where one might go out.
No door. No exit. Even close beside the writhing figures, I couldn't see them clearly, and the revelation
almost stopped me in my tracks. The sound was as clear as my own voice, but these figures were misty,
which meant that Lorn didn't remember them very well. It remembered the sound and those outside, but
not these. Just something, a something dying. There was a rush of unfocused anguish, a kind of thinning
in the atmosphere of the place. I grabbed Peter's hand and moved toward it, trying to find it. It was
stronger beside the monument he had climbed upon earlier, shattered now. The anguish I felt was anguish
at the destruction of this! Not at the death of the creature, but at this shattering.. . .

I moved in the direction of the feeling, pulling Peter along by one hand, not certain where.

And came out.

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We were standing in a desert. Nothing was happening. A chilly wind blew a few grains of sand restlessly
across the parched soil. Bristly growths spiked here and there on the limitless flat around a jagged line of
broken statues.

'Don't move,' I said, frustrated. 'I think we came in the wrong direction.' I tried to breathe, gasping, as
though I had been crying. What was it?

'What were you after?'

'There was this feeling of anguish. Grief.' I stopped, unable to go on. The feeling was still there, all
around me, a sadness so palpable it stopped my breath. I

16

gritted my teeth, did a small concentration spell, and was able to breathe once more. I went on, 'At first I
thought it was grief over something dying, but Lom didn't even remember the things that were dying, so it
had to be the grief over something else. Maybe grief over the destruction of the carving. Perhaps it was a
work of art.'

'Maybe not.' He mused over the unchanging scene. 'It could have been a monument. A cenotaph, maybe.
A memorial to someone or something dead which Lom did remember. And these may be more of the
same.' He gestured toward the shattered statues.

There was a funerary air to the place. Solemn. Still. No rush or fury of life. Only the barren soil, the
keening wind, the stark bulk of the carved stone against a line of distant mountains. The statue nearest us
looked away from me, to one side, staring into eternity. I couldn't tell what it was from this distance, but I
was afraid to go closer. I didn't want to leave the place we had come in without marking it. And how did
you mark something in a place like this? I tried scraping away at the sand beneath me. It scraped very
nicely, then slowly filled itself up like oozy mud. Evidently I could have only a temporary influence here.
I tried breaking a branch off a thorny bush. It broke, nipped my finger with a thorn, quietly dissolved in
my hand, and reappeared on the bush. The hole in my finger was still there. 'We can't make any lasting
changes, Peter. It restructures itself.'