"Foster, Alan Dean - Drowning World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

over a year now, ever since Charlie Sandravoe had gone nuts and
been granted a hasty medical discharge. Like everyone else, she
remembered the day when the well-liked Sandravoe had finally lost
it, tearing off his electrostatically charged rain cape and the clothes
underneath before flinging himself out the window and off the deck
outside the office she now occupied. He’d fallen nearly twenty
meters to the water below. Several members of the cultural staff,
whose offices were in the building below Administration, had seen
him plunge past the window of their workplace, arms at his sides,
legs together. Maria Chen-ha had had the best look. To this day,
she insisted that the face of the ex-administrator had been oddly
calm.

They’d found him floating below, miraculously alive, having just
missed cracking his skull on a number of intervening branches. A
couple of Deyzara had fished him out of the water and brought him
up. Diagnosis had been swift: mental breakdown brought on by too
much time on Fluva. Sandravoe had extended his tour of duty
several times, receiving a bonus for each extension. His offers had
been reluctantly accepted because it was hard to find qualified
personnel willing to remain on Fluva for any length of time. Besides
having to adjudicate the never-ending turmoil between the Deyzara
and the Sakuntala, there was also the often hostile and
unpredictable flora and fauna, the interesting new diseases, the
voracious molds and fungi, and of course the small and slightly
disturbing fact that it rained 90 percent of the year. And the
absence of dry land.

There was permanent dry land, Matthias knew. Up in the western
mountains that ran the length of Fluva’s single substantial
landmass. The mountains caught the flow of moisture from the
western ocean and turned it into rain. The rain fed thousands upon
thousands of rivers that, for most of the year, overflowed their
banks and drowned the immense tropical woodland that the
moisture supported. The result was varzea, where the land lay thirty
meters or so below the surface of the merged rivers. It was a
morass, it was a mess, and the combination had a disconcerting
tendency to drive visiting humans insane.

Not the Deyzara. Imported from Tharce IV a couple of hundred
years ago, the Deyzara were well adapted to working in Fluva’s
sodden conditions. They thrived in its climate, working the
plantations that produced dozens of highly valued botanicals and
other products. Preoccupied with fighting among themselves, the
native Sakuntala had accepted the Deyzara’s presence from the
beginning. Unfortunately, the Deyzara bred rather faster than the
locals, with the result that there were now nearly as many Deyzara
as long-arms. Now, a highly vocal and influential faction among the
Sakuntala wanted all Deyzara off the planet.