"Allen Steele - Chronospace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

Books by Allen Steele

ORBITAL DECAY
CLARKE COUNTY, SPACE
LUNAR DESCENT
LABYRINTH OF NIGHT
THE JERICHO ITERATION
THE TRANQUILLITY ALTERNATIVE
A KING OF INFINITE SPACE
OCEANSPACE
CHRONOSPACE

for Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

—ALEXANDER POPE


Autumn, 1365—8:05Z
The boy began climbing the mesa shortly after sunrise, stealing away from the village while his
mother was making breakfast for his sisters. It wasn’t long before she noticed his absence; he
heard her calling his name, her voice echoing off the sandstone bluffs of the canyon he called
home, but by then he was almost a third of the way up the narrow trail leading to the top of the
mesa.

Darting behind a pile of talus, he cautiously peered down at the adobe village. Pale brown smoke
rose from fire pits within its circular walls, and tiny figures moved along the flat rooftops. There
was no sign of pursuit, though, so after a few minutes he emerged from hiding and continued his
long ascent.

He had hiked to the top of the mesa several times before, but always in the company of his father
or one of his uncles, to set traps for tassel-ear squirrels and desert rabbits. The tribal elders had
decreed that children were never to leave Tyuonyi alone, for it was only within the settlement’s
fortified walls that they were safe from the Enemy. Yet the boy was never very obedient, and he
had been plotting this journey for several weeks now. He knew of a stand of juniper trees that
grew on top of the mesa. Although the morning was warm, the first frost had come to the canyon
a few days ago, and juniper berries would now be sweet enough to eat. He had bided his time
until his father and uncles went away on a hunting expedition, then he made his escape from the
village.

The boy was little more than five years old, but he was almost as strong as a child twice his age;
the soles of his bare feet were tough as leather, his small body accustomed to the rarefied air of
the high desert. He scurried up the steep path winding along the mesa’s rugged cliffs, barely
noticing the escarpments that plunged several hundred feet to the canyon floor. When he became
thirsty, he paused to dig a small cactus out of the ground; he pulled its quills, peeled its skin, and
chewed on its pulp as he continued his lonely trek.

It was shortly after he passed the landmark his father called Woman Rock—a sheer bluff scarred
by an oval-shaped crevasse that bore a faint resemblance to a vagina—that he came to the place