"Frank Herbert - Seed Stock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

The women should wait for us on the shore, he thought.

But colony command said the women-and even some of the children-were needed for too many other
tasks. Individual plants from home required personal attention. Single wheat stalks were nurtured with
tender care. Each orchard tree existed with its own handmaiden, its guardian dryad.

Atop the cliff, the fishermen came in sight of the long-houses, shipmetalquonsets named for some far
distant place and time in human affairs. Scattered electric lights ringed the town. Many of the unpaved
streets wandered off unlit. There were mechanical sounds here and murmurous voices.

The men scattered to their own affairs now, no longer a band. Kroudar plodded down his street toward
the open cook fires in the central plaza. The open fires were a necessity to conserve the more
sophisticated energies of the colony. Some looked upon those flames as admission of defeat. Kroudar
saw them as victory. It wasnative wood being burned.

Off in the hills beyond the town, he knew, stood the ruins of the wind machines they had built. The storm
which had wreaked that destruction had achieved no surprise in its coming, but had left enormous
surprise at its power.

For Kroudar, thethinkers had begun to diminish in stature then. When native chemistry and water life
had wrecked the turbines in the river which emptied into the harbor, those men of knowledge had shrunk
even more. Then it was that Kroudar had begun his own search for native foods.

Now, Kroudar heard, native plant life threatened the cooling systems for their atomic generators, defying
radiation in a way no life should. Some among the technicians already were fashioning steam engines of
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materials not intended for such use. Soon, they would have native metals, though-materials to resist the
wild etchings and rusts ofthis place.

They might succeed-provided the dragging sickness did not sap them further.

If they survived.



Honida awaited him at the door to their quarters, smiling, graceful. Her dark hair was plaited and wound
in rings around her forehead. The brown eyes were alive with welcome. Firelight from the plaza cast a
familiar glow across her olive skin. The high cheekbones of her Amerind ancestry, the full lips and
proudly hooked nose-all filled him with remembered excitement.

Kroudar wondered if theplanners had known this thing about her which gave him such warmth-her
strength and fecundity. She had chosenhim, and now she carried more of their children-twins again.

'Ahhh, my fisherman is home,' she said, embracing him in the doorway for anybody to see.