"Ian R. MaCleod - Verglas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Macleod Ian R)

dark sky, then she slowed, circled, chittering to her offspring to keep aloft until she was sure that all was
safe. There had to be an instinct for self-preservation, I supposed, and Marion was still Marion despite
everything that had changed. She was always the one who had that extra sense of danger for our kids. That
was why we'd decided she should go first.

I watched her finally settle on the table of rock. I saw her head pivot my way. I caught the faceted glint of her
eyes. Then, with a lilting, hopping motion, she moved toward the meat. I could understand more easily now
the point of that ugly metallic-sheened fur, her looped and whorled skin, that grayish-black coloring; she was
almost a part of the twilight. And her movements were so quick; the way her jointed arms shot out, and how
she kept her balance, her wings still outstretched, pushing against the wind, ready to lift and flee at any
moment. A bright hot flash of fluid as her claws broke open the meat. Then, when she was finally sure that all
was safe, she signaled to the children -- KAK KARR KIK KARR -- and they fluttered down with almost equal
grace to join her. The wind beat and howled. They stooped and folded their wings. The glacier-strewn
mountains shone in the distance.

It was over quickly, this moment that I'd almost given up hoping for. The fact was all -- they were here and
surviving -- and the mere sight of them feeding was nothing that I hadn't witnessed a thousand times before in
the simulations we'd run back on Earth. KI KIK KARR; a sound like stones knocking, then beating wings
again, and the brief fetal scent of fur and flesh. Marion the first to rise, to test -- protective as ever--the return
to their chosen element. Then Robbie and Sarah lifting as one, drawn by the wind. A mere process, it
seemed to me, of letting go, a skyward falling. I tried to follow them with my eyes but the sky between the
mountains had brimmed with night, showing only a last hint in the east. Three specks, laughing, chattering,
singing. Swooping.

I walked back down toward the base, calling on the lights as I did so, watching the string of tunnels and
canopies blossom and fan like so many paper lanterns. Too big for me, this place, now that I was on my own.
And I was sure that whatever remote chance there had been that the integration of the creatures that my
family had become might fail was already long-gone. Ducking the first of the air barriers, feeling the wind
lessen, I sensed the smug emanations of the thought machines. They were already far into the next century,
sniffing the wind, testing the air, communing with the questers, pushing things on and through, asking
endless what-ifs, checking for implausible or non-existent ecological anomalies. But Marion and Robbie and
Sarah would fit in. For us, Korai was perfect. There was a niche for a sky-borne predator that the indigenous
species would never fill.

The nights on Korai are as long as the days. The planet sits upright in its axis to Deres and the seasonal
shifts come from the passage and repassage of the dust belts that haze the space between. Somehow the
local wildlife manage to keep track of the complex cycles of long and short winters, cold or savage summers,
indeterminate haft-autumns, endless springs. It caused, I remembered, one of the longest and most
frustrating delays in configuring the new species. And the constant length of the periods of darkness was also
a surprising barrier, even though the days are near as doesn't matter to Earth-standard. Night and day
specializations don't seem to work here; you need to be able to see and function in either. The pseudocrabs
that scuttle across the tundra each morning possess smaller versions of the eyes that Marion flashed at me
before she started to feed. Polyhedral, with each facet wired independently to the brain, alternately set with
focusing and filtering layers of polarized cones. When a good design works, you carry on using it.

Marion came to me that night, as I'd half-expected she would. But it was hard to tell how much of it really
was her, how much had been simply pushed through my sleepsuit by the thought machines, how much was
my own pure imagination.

"I couldn't bury you," I said. "You're still here--your bodies, I mean. It seems gruesome, really, stupid. I know