"Zach Hughes - The Book of Rack the Healer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

would shield her relatively fragile body from the deadly projectiles. Had he
been born a Power Giver, he knew he too would seek the exultation of
being able to soar above the heavy gases to see and, to smell the thin, pure
air. It was, he suspected, ample compensation. All life eventually ended,
and the price of pleasure was death. Still in his rare transports inside the
power field of one of these fragile, beautiful beings, it always sobered him
to feel her depleting her very substance to obtain the energy needed to lock
into the planet's magnetic field and thereby negate the pull of the earth in
soaring flight far above the curve of the planet.

When she landed him near his establishment in the area of Red Earth
the Far Seer he bowed gratefully. She was away with a joyous leap, fading
quickly into the purpling air. She would need to find rest and protection
soon, for the yellow haze was thickening.

His establishment was precisely as he had left it at the beginning of the
summer when he had gone to fulfill his duty as a gatherer of the slime
source, the pulpy plants growing on the floor of the shallow, inshore seas.
He vented the accumulated poisons from his gills and breathed the clean,
rich air. In his absence the Breathers had literally overloaded the dome
with good air and it was sheer luxury to fall heavily into his rack and feel
life being pumped into all his storage cells as he worked his huge chest like
a bellows, breathing with sheer extravagance. He slept long and peacefully
and awoke to take his fill of the broth. He stretched his long, agile legs,
took in huge lungfuls of his rich air, and made an audible sound of
pleasure.

His Breathers were healthy and producing happily. In his absence, of
course, they had been regularly monitored by Red Earth, but Rack
double-checked their enclosures. He found that the feeding channels to the
outside were slightly corroded and he cleaned them carefully. After
cleaning the entry port and lock he discovered his housekeeping tasks
were finished. Already bored he wandered about his establishment
aimlessly.

Healers were, in general, a restless lot and Rack was no exception. As a
youth, he had caused considerable concern among his teachers by
exhibiting a startling lack of direction or ambition. His name derived
from a picture assigned to him by his mother because he had seemed
content to spend all his time in the sleeprack, his mind in contact with any
available Keeper, probing into the accumulated lore of the race with an
idle curiosity. If he had been interested in knowledge for the sake of
learning rather than for its entertainment value, his teachers had argued,
his constant Keeper contact would have been justified. But Rack had not
been interested in dry facts such as the positions of the sister worlds,
survival factors, and the state of the native Breather population in the
southern seas. Instead he had delved deeply into the mind banks of the
oldest Keepers, wanting to hear the ancient lore regarding the origin of
the race, asking stupid questions about the Old Ones.