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

women who live on the icy islands west of Neverness. His
adoptive brothers and sisters bore the signature of chromosomes
altered long ago; they each had strong, primal faces of jutting
browridges and deep-set eyes; their bodies were hairy and
powerful, covered with the skins of once-living animals; they
were more robust and vital, and in many ways much wiser, than
modern human beings. For a time, their world and Danlo's were
the same. It was a world of early morning hunts through frozen
forests, a world of pristine ice and wind and sea birds
flocking in white waves across the sky. A world of variety and
abundance. Above all, it was a world
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of halla, which is the Alaloi name for the harmony and beauty
of life. It was Danlo's tragedy to have to learn of halla's
fragile nature at an early age. Had he not done so, however, he
might never have made the journey home to the city of his
origins, and to his father. Had he not made the journey all men
and women must make, his small, cold world and the universe
which contains it might have known a very different fate.
Danlo came to manhood among Alaloi's Devaki tribe, who lived
on the mountainous island of Kweitkel. It had been the Devaki's
home for untold generations, and no one remembered that their
ancestors had fled the civilized ruins of Old Earth thousands
of years before. No one remembered the long journey across the
cold, shimmering lens of the galaxy or that the lights in the
sky were stars. No one knew that civilized human beings called
their planet 'Icefall'. None of the Devaki or the other tribes
remembered these things because their ancestors had wanted to
forget the shaida of a universe gone mad with sickness and war.
They wanted only to live as natural human beings in harmony
with life. And so they had carked their flesh and imprinted
their minds with the lore and ways of Old Earth's most ancient
peoples, and after they were done, they had destroyed their
great, silvery deepship. And now, many thousands of years
later, the Devaki women gathered baldo nuts to roast in wood
fires, and the men hunted mammoths or shagshay or even Totunye,
the great white bear. Sometimes, when the sea ice froze hard
and thick, Totunye came to land and hunted them. Like all
living things, the Devaki knew cold and pain, birth and joy and
death. Death тАУ was it not a Devaki saying, as old as the cave
in which they lived, that death is the left hand of life? They
knew well and intimately almost everything about death: the cry
of Nunki, the seal, when the spear pierces his heart; the
wailing of an old woman's death song; the dread silence of the
child who dies in the night. They knew the natural death that
makes
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room for more life, but about the evil that comes from nowhere
and kills even the strongest of the men, about the true nature
of shaida, they knew nothing.