"David Zindell - Requiem of Homo Sapiens 01 - The Broken God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

whispering just beyond the snow blocks above his head. Inside
him, there were other sounds, other whispers. He remembered the
way Choclo and some of the other men would sometimes look at
him strangely, the way their voices would drop into whispers
whenever he surprised them in some dark corner of the cave. He
had always
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imagined that everyone was talking about him when he wasn't
there to listen. There were darker memories, too: He had once
overheard Chandra and Ayame talking about a satinka, a witch
who had worked her evil and brought shaida to her people. He
had thought the story was of the dreamtime, the time of the
ancestors, the eternal, indestructible time that was at once
the history and the communal dreaming state of his people. He
must have been wrong, he thought. Perhaps there had been a
real satinka in the tribe. Perhaps this satinka had bewitched
his blood mother and father.
'Yes, Haidar knew your blood parents,' Soli admitted.
'Then what were their names? Why didn't he tell me?'
'He would have told you when you became a man, during your
passage. There is more to the story, things a boy should not
have to think about.'
'I am almost a man,' Danlo said. The set of his face was at
once open and pained, innocent and hard. 'Now that Haidar is
dead, you must tell me.'
'No, you are not a man yet.'
With his long fingernails, Danlo scraped frost off the ruff
of his sleeping furs. He tried to make out his reflection in
the glazed hut walls above him, but all he could see was his
shadow, the outline of his face and wild hair darkening the
milky white snow. 'I am almost a man, yes?'
'Next deep winter, after your passage, then you will be a
man.' Soli yawned and then said, 'Now it is time to sleep. We
must hunt tomorrow, or we will starve and join the rest of the
tribe on the other side.'
Danlo thought hard for a while. He had a naturally keen mind
made all the keener by the mind tools Soli had given him in
secret. Ever since he could remember, Soli had taken him alone
into the forest to draw figures in the hard-packed snow. He had
taught him geometry; he had taught him about things called
spheres and strange attractors and the infinities. Proof
structures and topology, and above all the beautiful,
crystalline logic which ordered the
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universe of number. Logic тАУ even though Danlo found it a
strange and wild way of thinking, he loved to argue logically
with Soli.
He held his hand up to his mouth to cover a smile, then said,
The journey across the eastern ice to the Unreal City will be
long and hard, yes?'