"Liz Williams - A Shadow Over the Land" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Liz)

A Shadow Over the Land
by Liz Williams
Bantam gave Liz Williams her most recent American book publication when
they released Banner of Souls last fall. The novel has picked up the authorтАЩs
third nomination for a Philip K. Dick Award. Her other books include The
Ghost Sister , Empire of Bones , The Poison Master , and Nine Layers of Sky . In
addition, Liz has had over forty short stories published in AsimovтАЩs , Interzone ,
Realms of Fantasy , and The Third Alternative . Her latest tale takes a young
woman on a perilous academic expedition.
****
I always knew that one day I would return to the veldt, to the light and the
silence. At night, when I closed my eyes, I could see the veldt rolling before me in
the darkness, all the way to the rocks of the Damara. They are red with iron, great
rusted cliffs that lift up out of the plains. Further in lies the Ushete Rift and the range
that the early settlers to this world called the Mountains of the Moon, meaning both a
barren land, and home. Gahran has a moon, too, and when it rises over the Ushete, it
seems close enough to touch, but I knew nothing of this land when I first came
there.
I first went to the veldt a year ago. The university had sent me out to
Yaounde, close to the border, with team leader Andre Vauchelade. I hadnтАЩt been at
the university for very long. I had arrived on Gahran from Earth, where IтАЩd held a
post at Nairobi. I was less sure of myself, a year ago. More things seemed to matter
to me, and to matter more. The Yaounde expedition seemed fraught with
importance. I had so much to prove, both as a young researcher and as a woman
from Earth. Vauchelade had a reputation as an exacting man, who was hard to work
for and harder to like. I remember sitting on the edge of my bed the night before we
left, clasping my hands together until they hurt, and thinking that I must not fail, that I
must be perfect in all that I did. Now, I look back and wonder. I failed, certainly, to
make my reputation or even to protect my name, and now it hardly matters.
I lived out the last year in the city, went to the university by day and came
back at night to write and sleep. At work, I kept myself to myself, as far as that was
possible with a hundred and seventy students to worry about. Yet somewhere at the
back of my mind, I was always aware of the contrast, of the part of the world that
was absent.
Irubin, where I lived, was one of the big transcontinental ports: you could
stand on one end of the Benue Bridge and look across to the distant hazy shore on
the other side. The city straddled a long arm of the sea, but on the shore beneath the
bridge, there was only an echo of salt on the wind, and the water was sepia with river
sand. I tried to escape at weekends to the northern coast, to the long sweep of Hama
beach beyond the shanty blocks, and watch the breakers roll in. I never found what I
was looking for, and never expected to, for the veldt had marked me, and I could
never see the city in the same way again.
In the veldt, there is no one and there is no water, unless one follows the thin
line of the river Ghila. It was barren land, to the unschooled eye, but I am a
geologist, and it was rich country for me. I could see life everywhere, the lost life of
this world that had ebbed to leave its traces in the rocks.
Yaounde had been established as a military outpost some seventy years ago,
when the first settlers arrived and no one knew what lived out in the veldt. This was
before they discovered how empty this world really was, with only the thinnest
scattering of life of its own. When we came through the building at the end of the