"John Varley - Titan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

"You're probably right"
"No, you're right. I mean, I'm right, but you're right that we should be more careful. I'd hate to cat something I ought to he talking to. Hey, what was that?"
It wasn't a noise, but the realization that noise had ceased. Only the splash of water and the high hiss of leaves disturbed the silence. Then, building so quietly and so slowly that they had been bearing it for minutes before they could identify it, came a vast moan.
God might moan like that, if He had lost everything He had ever loved, and if He had a throat like an organ pipe a thousand kilometers long. It continued to build on a note that somehow managed to rise without ever straying from the uttermost lower limits of human hearing. They felt it in their bowels and behind their eyeballs.
It already seemed to fill the universe, and yet still it got louder. It was joined by the sound of a string section: cellos and electronic basses. Treading lightly on top of this massive tonal floor were supersonic hissing overtones. The ensemble grew louder when it was not possible that it could grow louder.
Cirocco thought her skull would shatter. She was dimly aware of Gaby hugging her. They stared slack-jawed as they were showered by dead leaves from the vault overhead. Tiny animals fell, twisting and bouncing. The ground began to throb in sympathy. It yearned to fly apart and hurl itself into the air. A dust- devil skittered indecisively, then dashed itself to pieces on the bones of the tree where they huddled. They were lashed with debris.
There was crashing above them, and a wind began to reach down to the forest floor. A massive branch embedded itself in the middle of the stream. By then the forest was swaying and creaking, protesting: gunshots, and nails wrenched from dry wood.
The violence reached a plateau and stayed at that level. The winds seemed to be about sixty kilometers per hour. Higher up it sounded much worse. They stayed low in the protection of the tree roots and watched the storm rage around them. Cirocco had to shout to be heard above the bass moaning.
"What do you suppose could cause it to come up so fast?"
"I have no idea," Gaby yelled back. "Local heating or cooling, a big change in the air pressure. I don't know what would cause that, though. "
"I think the worst is over. Hey, your teeth are chattering."
"I'm not scared anymore. I'm cold."
Cirocco was feeling it, too. The temperature was plunging. in just a few minutes it had gone from balmy to chilly, and now she judged it was getting down around zero. With the wind coming at sixty klicks, it was no laughing matter. They huddled togeth- er, but she could feel the heat being sucked from her back.
"We've got to get to some kind of shelter," she yelled.
"Yeah, but what?"
Neither of them wanted to move from what little shelter they had. They tried covering each other with dirt and dead leaves, but the wind blew it away.
When they were sure they would freeze to death, the wind stopped. it did not diminish; it stopped dead, and Cirocco's cars popped so hard it hurt. She could not hear until she forced a yawn.
"Wow. I've heard of pressure changes, but nothing like that." - The forest was quiet again. Then Cirocco found that if she listened carefully she could hear the dying ghost of whatever had made the moaning sound. It made her shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. She had never thought of herself as imaginative, but the moan had sounded so human, though on such a mighty scale. It made her want to lie down and die.
"Don't go to sleep, Rocky. We've got something else."
"What now?" She opened her eyes and saw a fine white powder drifting through the air. It sparkled in the pale light.
"I'd call it snow." They went as fast as they could to keep their feet from getting numb, and Cirocco knew it was only the still air that saved them. It was cold; even the ground was cold for a change. Ciroc- co felt drugged. It could not be possible. She was a spaceship captain; how had she ended up trudging through a snowstorm in her bare skin?
But the snow was transitory. At one point it was a few centimeters deep on the ground, but then the heat began to well up from below and it melted quickly. Soon the air was getting warmer. When they felt it was safe, they found a place on the warm ground and went to sleep.

The haunch of meat did not smell too good when they awoke, and neither did Gaby's hide belt. They threw it all away and washed in the stream, then Gaby killed another of the animals they had begun to call smilers. It was as easy as it had been the last time.
They felt much better after breakfast, which they supplemented with some of the less exotic fruits they found in great profusion. Cirocco liked one that looked like a lumpy pear but had meat like a melm. It tasted like sharp cheddar cheese.
She felt as if she could march all day, but it turned out that they could not. The stream, their guide for the whole journey so far, vanished in a large hole at the base of a hill.
The two of them stood on the edge of the hole ;and looked down. It gurgled like the drain of a bathtub, but at long intervals made a sucking sound followed by a deep belch. Cirocco didn't like it, and edged away.
"Maybe I'm crazy," she said, "but I wonder if this is where the thing that ate us gets its water? "
"Could be. I'm not diving in to find out. So what's next?" "I wish I knew."
"We could go back to where we started and wait there." Gaby did not seem enthusiastic about that idea.
"Damn! I thought sure we'd find a place to look around if we went far enough. Do you think the whole inside of Themis is one big rain forest?"
Gaby shrugged. "I don't have enough information, obviously." Cirocco chewed it over for a while. Gaby was apparently willing to let her make the decisions. "Okay. First we go to the top of this hill and see what it's like. One more thing I'd like to try if there's nothing worthwhile up there is to climb one of these trees. Maybe we could get high enough to see something. Do you think we could do it?"
Gaby studied a trunk. "Sure, in this gravity. That's no guarantee we'll be able to stick our heads out, though."
"I know. Let's go up the hill."
It was steeper than the countryside they had come through. There were places where they had to use hands and feet, and Gaby led the way through those because she had more experi- ence in rock climbing. She was agile, much smaller and more limber than Cirocco, and soon Cirocco felt every month of the age difference between them.
"Holy shit, take a look at that!"
"W.hat is it?" Cirocco was a few meters behind. When she looked up she saw only Gaby's legs and buttocks, from a distinctly unusual angle. It was odd, she thought, that she had seen all the male crew members naked, but had to come to Themis to see Gaby. What a strange creature she was with no hair.
"We've found our scenic viewpoint," Gaby said. She turned around and gave Cirocco a hand.
There were trees growing on the brow of the hill, but they did not approach the height of the ones behind them. Though they were dense and overgrown with vines, none was over ten meters tall.
Cirocco had wanted to climb the hill to see what was on the other side. Now she knew. The hill didn't have an other side.
Gaby was standing a few meters from the edge of a cliff. With every step Cirocco took the view adjusted itself, receding, encompassing more area. When she stood beside Gaby she still could not see the cliff face, but she had some idea of how long the drop was. It would he measured in kilometers. She felt her stomach lurch.
They stood at-a natural window formed by a twenty-meter gap between the outermost trees. There was nothing in front of them but air for 200 kilometers.
They were at the edge of the rim, looking across the breadth of Themis to the other side. Over there was a hairline shadow that might have been a cliff like the one they were standing on. Above the line was green land, fading to white, then to gray, and finally becoming a brilliant yellow as her eyes traveled up the sloping side to the translucent area in the roof.
Her eyes were drawn back down the curve to the distant cliff. Below it was more green land, with white clouds hugging the ground or towering up higher than she was. It looked like the view from a mountaintop on Earth, but for one thing. The ground seemed level until she looked to the left or right.
It bent. She gulped, and craned her neck, twisting, trying to make it level, trying to deny that far away the land was higher than she was without ever having risen.
She gasped and clutched at the air, then went down on hands and knees. It felt better that way. She edged closer to the abyss and kept looking to her left. Far away was a land of shadow, tilted on its side for her examination. A dark sea twinkled in the night, a sea that somehow did not leave its shores and come spilling toward her. On the other side of the sea was another area of light, like the one in front of her, dwindling in the distance. Beyond it her view was cut off by the roof overhead, seeming to belly down to meet the land. She knew it was an illusion of the perspective; the roof would be just as high if she stood beneath it at that point.
They were on the edge of one of the areas of permanent day. A hazy terminator began to blanket the land to her right, not sharp and clear like the terminator of a planet seen from space, but fad- ing through a twilight zone she estimated to be thirty or forty kilometers wide. Beyond that zone was night, but not blackness. There was a huge sea in there, twice as large as the one in the
other direction, looking as if bright moonlight was falling on it. it sparkled like a plain of diamond.
"Isn't that the direction the wind came from?" Gaby asked. "Yeah, if we didn't get turned around by a curve in the river." "I don't think we did. That looks like ice to me."
Cirocco agreed. The ice sheet broke up as the sea narrowed to a neck, eventually becoming a river that ran in front of her and emptied into the other sea. The country over there was moun- tainous, rugged as a washboard. She did not understand how the river could thread its way through the mountains to join the sea on the other side. She decided the perspective was fooling her. Water would not flow uphill, even in Themis.