"Niven, Larry - Building Harlequin's Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"Gloria!" she called.
A sound floated up to her—not a word, but a whimper.




Chapter 8: Wild Water


Rachel squatted on the edge of the drop, inches to the right of Gloria's dragging foot tracks, and one long dragging handprint in the dust. Rachel's feet were on hard rock, solid, crumbling away almost immediately past her, falling to nothing, and rising as a hard edge again just twenty feet away—with a run, she could jump to the other side.
Water gurgled below her. This wasn't the Hammered Sea; there was no water engineering in Erika's Folly that Rachel knew of. A wild stream? Flowing into the crater?
"Gloria, can you hear me?"
"Yyy ... yow. Yesss."
"Be calm. I can't see you. You're not far down; I can hear you pretty clearly."
"I... I fell. The quake came ... and I lost my balance, and I... I just slid down. The ground went away right under my feet. Rachel... I'm scared. It hurts."
"What hurts?"
"My ... my ankle." Rachel heard choking sobs.
"Are you standing on something? Is the ground good?"
"I'm okay, I think. There's water, and it's running down, and it's rocky down here and darker. I can see, but the light is thin."
Thin light? "Is it a cave?"
"I can see under where you are. I can't tell how far it goes."
Rachel took a step to look, and the edge crumbled under her. She tried to slide back, failed, and fell. She was right over where Gloria had fallen! She twisted, trying to angle her fall away from the girl. A thump, and she felt something under her—long, so it must be a leg or an arm. There was a sound of pain. So she hadn't killed her, or buried her.
"Gloria?'
"That hurt too." Gloria's voice was small.
"Yeah, well, now we're both down here," Rachel said dryly, trying to make it into a joke.
She'd landed on sand on top of rocks, Gloria's right leg under her thigh. She pushed herself back. Gloria was holding the ankle of the leg Rachel had missed; it was at least twice its normal size.
Some leader she was. Why hadn't she called for help? They'd be hard to find in this hole. She should have told the others right away, but she'd gotten caught up in the moment. Gabriel will be mad at me. She pushed the thought away, afraid it would paralyze her.
Climbing out the way they fell in looked impossible. They'd fallen at the edge of a wide underground riverbed. Still water puddled in the center of the rocky riverbed, and water stains showed clearly the fissure walls, high up, above her head. The walls curved above her, narrowing to the slim crack they'd fallen through. High tide would drown them.
It was only ten feet to where Rachel had just been sitting, but it might as well have been orbit. They needed another way.
The fissure stretched up and down the crater, stream-cut, thin, and full of jumbled rocks. Rachel stood, testing. Her limbs worked. The stream floor was clearly too narrow and uneven for a girl with a sprained ankle to walk through.
She broadcast their problem to the others while Gloria leaned into her and moaned softly. The other four were together by the flier, above the tide line, almost twenty degrees around the crater from them. It took ten precious minutes to get a plan they all understood. Ali and Ursula would stay with the plane, and look for a good place to land it away from the water system. Gabriel and Harry would come on foot, following tracks, roped together to guard against dangerous footing. Rachel and Gloria were to look for a way out.
Harlequin pulled the sea toward them. Her wrist pad showed less than half an hour until high tide. She sighed and helped Gloria up. Gloria couldn't put any weight on the bad ankle. Rachel's own leg, the leg she had landed on, was sore, with dark splotches of bruising already flushing the back of her thigh. Gloria was only half Rachel's height, so Rachel knelt down and helped Gloria climb onto her back. The girl winced and cried out; she had to let her ankle flop loosely and hold onto Rachel's shoulders with both of her small hands.
For a while Rachel was able to walk up a loose grade at the edge of the stream, and they gained some height. Water stains showed they were still below tide line. Gloria's weight pushed down on Rachel's hips. The walls narrowed in on them, and Rachel reached and pulled and scrambled up big boulders, panting and straining. Gloria's weight slowed her down. Instead of jumping as she would have by herself, she had to climb, pulling them up by grabbing sharp edges of boulders. Rachel's hands grew tender from the rough rocks, and the heel of her right palm bled. They climbed almost straight up now; pull and step, pull and reach, step. Twice, Gloria's foot swung against stone and the girl cried out sharply. Otherwise Gloria was silent, but rigid, a difficult burden to balance. Sometimes Rachel felt her shake. "We can't stop," she said after a third accidental brush of Gloria's foot against rock.
"I know," Gloria whispered back.
After ten minutes Rachel stopped. Her arms had no strength left, and she was afraid she'd drop Gloria, who seemed to be getting heavier and sticking out more with every step. The walls were only six feet apart here, and they'd climbed above the stream. Water still made a quiet rushing sound, flowing many feet below their perch on unsteady wedged boulders.
Rachel leaned forward, weight across a large rounded stone, seeking temporary rest for her back muscles. Gloria managed to stay mounted, taking some of her own weight by resting her hands and one knee against rock. Rachel's back was starting to feel better when Gloria whispered, "Water."
Rachel shot up, grabbing Gloria, and turned to look. It was there, rising below them. It had swallowed the place where they fell, and was eating the tracks Rachel had made in the first easier steps. She started moving again, working her way up. A cliff loomed ahead—a massive rock face, twenty feet high, with no easy steps or handholds. A wide vertical crack bisected the face, smooth and featureless.
A camera-bot buzzed around them. Gabriel knew where they were. He and Harry were closer now, staying away from the fissure, but climbing up. They'd chosen a place to start angling over.
"I'm looking down at water and up at a cliff," she told Gabriel.
"I know. Hang on, Rachel; we're nearby. A few minutes."
She glanced behind them. It would be close. "I'm putting Gloria down to see if I can use this crack and my weight and get up there. I'm not willing to risk it with her on my back, not until I see what it's like. After I do it once on my own, I'll go back for her."
"Okay."
"I'm going now." She knelt down and helped Gloria off her back, wincing at the little cry of pain Gloria made as she settled onto the stone. "That's a brave girl," Rachel said, turning to wedge hands, arms, and shoulders into the wide crack and inch her body up the rough wall. It was slow going. Her hands shook with pain, and her biceps and calves quivered with the strain of holding her weight up just by pushing. She left skin and blood from her palm on the rocks. She looked back once, and the height made her dizzy with fear. The stones below her looked like sharp teeth. Water licked up the rocks, urging her to keep going up. Gloria was too close to the water, and that scared her. "It will be okay, Gloria," she called, terribly afraid that it wouldn't.
As she inched toward the top she heard a voice, close, just overhead. "Rachel, we're here." It was Gabriel.
A rope dangled in front of her. There was no way to grab it. "I can't," she said.
"Carefully," Gabriel said softly. "Find a way to get the rope."
She reached, fingers not quite touching the rope, felt the fall below her and pulled her hand back. "Swing the rope," she called up.
She shifted her feet, managing enough balance to grab the rope with one shaking hand and pull it in to her, knotting it around her chest. She let out a long cry of relief as they pulled her up the last few yards of cliff face. In mere steps she was in Gabriel's arms, and then Harry's.
Harry set her down and handed her the butt end of the rope, telling her to run it around her back and brace her feet. She did, and Gabriel went down the face for Gloria while she and Harry belayed. The rope hurt her raw hands and pulled tightly against her back. It was surprisingly fast given how long the climb up the fissure had seemed—in just moments Gabriel was back, Gloria tucked in front of him, her arms around his neck.
"You girls did well," he said.