"Marta Randall - The View from Endless Scarp" - читать интересную книгу автора (Randall Marta)

multiplied. They benefited the natives. They prospered. They were very
proud of themselves.
The sky deepened from blue to rose, and the shadow of the Scarp cast
long, red fingers across the scorched plain. Not even meka trees grew
there now; they had died of prosperity and had not returned with the
return of drought. Markowitz stared into the increasing darkness, hoping
as always for a distant glimmer of light. Day fell into night and no fires
glowed; if Thompson built a signal fire, he built it beyond the curve of the
horizon. She felt a sudden, powerful longing, not for the safety of the
departed ships, but for the circle of Thompson's arms. She shook her head
and looked across the desert. The rose tints of the plain darkened to
purple. The air chilled.
She put on her jacket and her reed hat and walked from cave to cave,
prying up boulders and extracting the things she had hidden. Some of the
Peri followed at a distance, curious, but didn't approach her. She ignored
them. They would not steal her belongings as long as she carried them.
She built a fire in front of the last cave, for warmth and as a signal
across the dark, for Thompson. In its flickering light she loaded her
supplies into the carrying pack, strapped the knives to her belt, and ate a
handful of berries. She wet her lips from the canteen, and, after stringing
vines and gourds across the cave's entrance as an alarm, she lay with her
head on the pack and stared at the patch of night behind the rocks.
Eventually she slept.
 ***



Twenty years of prosperity; then the engines of change broke down. An
arctic storm jammed the unjammable metering station at the pole:
Hohbach, their chief of science, thought that a defective casing on the
self-repair devices cracked and the equipment froze. The wrong circuit
activated the wrong relay in the delicate sensing and transmitting
mechanism in the monitors' cores. The wrong signal beamed up to the
great engines that had nudged the moon into a new course, and the
engines exploded. The moon, its path so cautiously modified to modify the
tides of air and water, twisted in the sky and stabilized into a new orbit;
the earth heaved and groaned; the winds shrieked. Hundreds of Terrans
and thousands of Peri died. The ocean currents changed, and the rains fell
far out to sea. Within a season the broad, ripe plain withered; the rivers
and lakes shrank to mud and baked away in the fierce sunlight.
The northern and western oceans were unnavigable, and the southern
desert extended as far as scouts could walk and canteens last. The Peri
spoke of a verdant land they said lay to the east, but few of them left. In
the second year, the springs failed. For a short time the colony depended
on the distilling stations along the boulder-strewn ocean shore, as they
had done during the initial terraforming years. They carted water across
the coastal hills to the village on the Scarp and the fertile land around it,
but the stations broke down, or were vandalized by the Peri, or taken in
storms, and the supply of brackish water stopped. Their generators
cracked and stopped. They expended the last of their dwindling power to