"George R. R. Martin - Dying of the Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

no problem. It is my name."
He only shrugged. "You're happy, then?"
Gwen rose and brushed loose sand from her legs. "Jaan and I-well, there is a lot that is hard to explain. You were a
friend once, Dirk, and maybe my best friend. But you've been gone a long time. Don't press too hard. Right now I
need a friend. I talk to Arkin, and he listens and tries, but he can't help much. He's too involved, too blind about
Kavalars and their culture. Jaan and Garse and I have problems, yes, if that's what you're asking. But it's hard to
speak of them. Give me time. Wait, if you will, and be my friend again."
The lake was very still in the perpetual red-gray sunset. He watched the water, thick with its spreading scabs of
fungus, and he flashed back to the canal on Braque. Then she did need him, he thought. Perhaps it was not as he had
hoped, but there was still something he could give her. He clung to that tightly; he wanted to give, he had to give.
"Whatever," he said as he rose. "There's a lot I don't understand, Gwen. Too much. I keep thinking that half the
conversation of the past day has gone past me, and I don't even know the right questions to ask. But I can try. I owe
you, I guess. I owe you for something or other."
"You'll wait?"
"And listen, when the time comes."
"Then I'm glad you've come," she said. "I needed someone, an outsider. You're well timed, Dirk. A luck."
How strange, he thought, to send off for a luck. But he said nothing. "Now what?"
"Now let me show you the forest. That was why we came here, after all."
They picked up their sky-scoots and walked away from the silent lake, toward the thick of the waiting forest. There
was no trail to follow, but the underbrush was light and walking easy, with many paths to choose from. Dirk was
quiet, studying the woods around him, his shoulders slumped and his hands shoved deep into his pockets. Gwen did
all the talking; the little there was. When she spoke, her voice was low and reverent as a child's whisper in a great
cathedral. But mostly she just pointed and let him look.
The trees around the lake were all familiar friends that Dirk had seen a thousand times before. For this was the so-
called forest of home, the wood that man carried with him from sun to sun and planted on all the worlds he walked. It
had its roots on Old Earth, the homeforest, but it was not all of Earth. On each new planet humanity found new
favorites, plants and trees that soon were as much a part of the blood as those that came out from Earth in the
beginning. And when the starships moved on, seedlings from those worlds went with the twice-uprooted
grandchildren of Terra, and so the homeforest grew.
Dirk and Gwen passed through that forest slowly, as others had walked through the same forest on a dozen other
worlds. And they knew the trees. Sugar maples there, and fire maples, and mockoak and oak itself, and silverwood
and poison pine and asten. The outworlders had brought them here even as their ancestors had brought them to the
Fringe, to add a touch of home, wherever home might be.
But here these woods looked different.
It was the light, Dirk realized after a time. The drizzling light that leaked so meager from the sky, the wan red
gloom that passed for Worlorn's day. This was a twilight forest. In the slowness of time-in a far-extended autumn-it
was dying.
He looked closer then and saw that the sugar maples were all bare, their faded leaves beneath his feet. They would
not green again. The oaks were barren too. He paused and pulled a leaf from a fire maple, and saw that the fine red
veins had turned to black. And the silverwoods were really dusty gray.
 Rot would come next.
To parts of the forest, rot had come already. In one forlorn glen where the humus was thicker and blacker than
elsewhere, Dirk noticed a smell. He looked at Gwen, asking. She bent and brought a handful of the black stuff to his
nose, and he turned away.
"It was a bed of moss," she told him, sorrowing. "They brought it all the way from Eshellin. A year ago it was all
green and scarlet, alive with little flowers. The black spread quickly."
They moved farther into the forest, away from the lake and the mountainwall. The suns were nearly overhead by
now, Fat Satan dim and bloated like a blood-drenched moon, unevenly ringed by four small yellow star-suns.
Worlorn had receded too far and in the wrong direction; the Wheel effect was lost.
They had been walking for more than an hour when the character of the forest around them began to change.