"James Tiptree Jr. -10000 Light Years From Home" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiptree James Jr)

the low cart bed. Girl and wolf began to roll the red body sideways toward the ramp.
“Wait,” the boy said suddenly. “Don’t hurt him. What have you done to him?”
“He’s all right,” the girl told him. The man’s shoulders were lolling against her knees, his upper arm
slashed red where the wolf had gripped him.
“Wait, let me look,” said the boy. He still did not get out but sat staring, Licking his thin lips.
“Our savior.” His voice was harsh and high. “There’s your damned Y chromosome. He’s filthy.”
He pulled his head back and they tumbled the unconscious man up onto the cart. There were hasps
and straps on the floor. The girl’s boots were got off and she fastened him down, her bruised toes
clumsy. As they got him secure he began to groan. The girl pulled back her lips to reveal the syringe
fastened between teeth and cheek and carefully jetted more vapor on his face.
 The boy watched them through his rear window, twisted in his seat. He was drinking from a
canteen. On the wagon the girl unhitched her companion’s harness pack and they ate and drank too.
They grinned at the boy. He did not grin back. His eyes were on the great red-gold man:
The girl toed him idly, jostling his thick limbs, his genitals.
“Don’t do that!” the boy called sharply. The air was cold.
“Do you think he needs a blanket?” asked the girl.
“No! Yes,” he said exhaustedly.
When the wolf reared up beside the cab door the boy was bent over, hauling blankets from behind
his seat. The cab’s interior was cluttered with tubing and levers. On the floor, where the boy’s feet should
have been, was an apparatus from which tubes led upward. When he straightened up it could be seen
that he had no legs. His torso was strapped to the seat and ended in a cocoon of canvas into which
tubing led. His face was wet-streaked.
“We can all go die, now,” he pushed the blankets out the window, ramming with sinewy arms.
Wetness ran down his thin jaw, fell on the blanket. The girl peered around the side, said nothing. The
wolf grabbed a double fold of blanket and slung the rest back over his shoulder as he dropped to all
fours. The boy hung his arms around the steering wheel and let his head go down.
Girl and wolf covered the man on the cart and fastened up its side. He draped a blanket on her,
leaped to the ground. The boy’s head came up. He started the tractor and they lurched out onto the
road. Above them no bat flew, no night bird hunted, here or anywhere in the empty world. Only the
tractor moved across the moonlit plain, a gray beast trotting behind. No insects came to the yellow
headlight beam. Before them the road stretched away neutrally to the crests above the Rift, in the land
that had been Ethiopia.



THE PEACEFULNESS OF VIVYAN
The newsman had come a long way, studied by small spaceburnt men who wore their lasers against
naked callus. And he in turn had stared at his first sealmen, the natives of McCarthy’s World. The
newsman had been careful not to call it McCarthy’s World now, but Sawewe. Sawewe meaning of
course Freedom.
For another long wait all the newsman had seen of Sawewe was the dilapidation of the old Terran
Enclave; a perfectly flat view of sea on one side and tropical scrub on the other. The surface of Sawewe
was a limestone plain pitted with sinkholes which led—some of them—to the continent-wide cavern
system in which the sealmen lived. Worthless, except that those gray-green spikes stretched unharvested
to the horizon were silweed. The newsman, whose name was Keller, blew out his lips when he saw it.
Back in the Empire a gram bag of silweed was worth half his pay-voucher. He knew now why the
planet-burners had been held off.
Finally, because Keller was patient and tough and his credentials were good there came the long trip
in the sealed floater, and the blindfold, and the longer hours of stumbling down and down. Sawewe was
not trusting toward Terrans. Keller tripped, heard a faint splash echo. Sealmen hooted, a scanner