"Richard A. Lupoff - After the Dreamtime" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lupoff Richard A)

Miralaidj and she will bear you beautiful sons and daughters to carry on
the line of the Aranda and to sail the membrane ships after you."

Wuluwaid envied me, I know. We were the sailors of the star-winds, we
the Aranda and the Kunapi. We few thousands who owned a world,
Yurakosi, where our old folk go to live when they become grayed-out,
caring for the children too young for space. The rest of us, our
melanin-rich skins protecting us from the hard radiations of space, were
the select of all mankind.

We alone, we few thousand, can sail the membrane ships, working their
decks and masts all but naked to the stars. Others envy our gift, blasting
from sun to sun sealed in iron boxes, venturing out only when clad in
clumsy, clanking spacesuits… and we in trousers and sweaters, the only
living beings we know of who can survive as we are in deep space,
sustained only by a close-air generator the size of a hand strapped to one
leg.

Back on the mother planet earth our distant ancestors had been
separated by some trick of geography, cut off from human crossbreeding
and left to survive beneath the burning sky of the old Australian continent.
Blackfellows, the other earthers called our ancestors when they found
them after an isolation of twenty-five thousand years. Blackfellows,
aborigines, or—confusing our ancestors with another black race of
earth—bushmen.

Great Mother knows there were plenty of other blacks on the old earth.
(There, Wuluwaid would be pleased with me; I call on the name "Great
Mother" for strength even though I claim no belief in the old mythology of
the Dreamtime.) There were peoples in old Africa, old Asia, with as much
dark pigment in their skin as we have in ours. But among our people there
was some subtle difference, some microscopic chemical variation that was
amplified by the hard radiation of space. Other humans would sicken and
die in the raw blast of the cosmos. We alone could thrive. Only slowly, in
the course of many years, does the solar wind, the cosmic radiation, break
down our melanin.

Then we gray out. Then we can travel in space no longer on the decks,
in the masts and the rigging of the membrane ships. Then to venture
outside the protection of a passenger tank we would need to wear
spacesuits, like other men. The decks are still open, but in a spacesuit one
cannot work the lines properly, and even if one could—what point in
thumping about like a leaden automaton in the midst of grace and
freedom?

Sail in a spacesuit? No sky-hero has ever so chosen. Space is not closed
even then to us. We can travel with the meat, we can loll in the comfort of
the passenger tank along with the men and women whom we carry like
freight in the passenger tanks of our membrane ships.