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

Slowly, subtly, the change seeped in, almost too gradual for Dirk to notice. But Gwen showed him. The familiar
blend of homeforest was giving way, yielding to something stranger, something unique, something wilder. Gaunt
black trees with gray leaves, high walls of red-tipped briar, drooping weepers of pale phosphorescent blue, great
bulbous shapes infested with dark flaking splotches; to each of these
Gwen pointed and gave a name. One type became more and more common: a towering yellowish growth that
sprouted tangled branches from all over its waxy trunk, and smaller offshoots from those branches, and still smaller
ones from those, until it had built itself into a tight wooden maze. "Chokers," Gwen called them, and Dirk soon saw
why. Here in the deep of the wood one of the chokers had grown alongside a regal silverwood, sending out crooked
yellow-wax branches to mingle with straight, stately gray ones, burrowing roots under and around those of the other
tree, constricting its rival in an ever-tightening vise. And now the silverwood could scarce be seen: a tall dead stick
lost in the swelling choker.
"The chokers are native to Tober," Gwen said. "They're taking over the forests here, just as they did there. We
could have told them it would happen, but they wouldn't have cared. The forests were all doomed anyway, even
before they were planted. Even the chokers will die, though they'll be the last to go."
They walked on, and the chokers grew steadily thicker, until soon they dominated the forest. Here the woods were
denser, darker; passage was more difficult. Half-buried roots tripped them underfoot, while tangled branches
interlocked above them like the straining arms of giant wrestlers. Where two or three or more chokers grew close
together, they seemed to merge into a single twisted knot, and Gwen and Dirk were forced to detour. Other plant life
was scarce, except for beds of black and violet mushrooms near the feet of the yellow trees, and ropes of parasitic
scumweb.
But there were animals.
Dirk saw them moving through the dark twistings of the chokers and heard their high, chittering call. Finally he
saw one. Sitting just above their heads on a swollen yellow branch, looking down on them; fist-sized, dead still, and
somehow-transparent. He touched Gwen's shoulder and nodded upward. -
But she just smiled for him and laughed lightly.
Then she reached up to where the little creature sat and crumpled it in her hand. When she offered it to Dirk, her
palm held only dust and dead tissue.
"There's a nest of tree-spooks around," she explained. "They shed their skins four or five times before maturity and
leave the husks as guards to scare away other predators." She pointed. "There's a live one, if you're interested."
Dirk looked and caught a fleeting glimpse of a tiny yellow scampering thing with sharp teeth and enormous brown
eyes. "They fly too," Gwen told him. "They've got a membrane that goes from arm to leg and lets them flit between
the trees. Predators, you know. They hunt in packs, can bring down creatures a hundred times their size. But
generally they won't attack a man unless he blunders into their nest."
The tree-spook was gone now, lost beneath a labyrinth of choker branches, but Dirk thought he saw another,
briefly, from the corner of his eye. He studied the woods around him. The transparent skin husks were everywhere,
staring fiercely into the twilight from their perches, all small grim ghosts. "These are the things that get Janacek so
upset, aren't they?" he asked.
Gwen nodded. "The spooks are a pest on Kimdiss, but here they've really found their element. They blend
perfectly with the chokers, and they can move through the tangles faster than anything I've ever seen. We studied
them pretty thoroughly. They're cleaning out the forests. In time, they would kill off all the game and starve
themselves to death, but they won't have time. The shield will fail before that, and the cold will come." She moved
her shoulders in a tiny weary shrug and rested her forearm on a low-drooping limb. Their coveralls had long ago
become the same dirty yellow color as the woods around them, but her sleeve slid up and back as she brushed the
branch, and Dirk saw the dull sheen of jade-and-silver gleaming against the choker.
"Is there much animal life left?"
"Enough," she said. Pale red light made the silver strange. "Not as much as there used to be, of course. Most of the
wildlife has deserted the homeforest. Those woods are dying, and the animals know it. But the outworld trees are
sterner, somehow. Where the forests of the Fringe were planted, you'll find life, still strong, still hanging on. The
chokers, the ghost trees, the blue widowers-they'll flourish right until the end. And they'll have their tenants, old and
new, until the cold comes."