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

faces, a stocky gray-brown man textured all over except for two white owl-rings around his eyes which
meant he wore goggles a lot.
Vivyan smiled at him as he did at everyone and when the singing was over he skiied out across the
moonlight to the ice-forests, pausing often to touch and examine lovingly the life of this mountain world. It
was not long before certain snow-creatures trusted him, and the even shyer floating animals who were
Horl’s birds. The girl who had been with the brown man came to him too. Girls usually did.
Vivyan found this delightful but not remarkable. People and animals always came to him and his
body knew the friendly and joyful ways to touch each kind.
People, of course, seemed to need also to talk and talk, which was a pity because their talk was
mostly without meaning. Vivyan himself talked only to his special friend on Horl, the man who knew the
names and hidden lives of the snow world and accepted all that Vivyan had observed. Thus should a man
live, Vivyan knew, questing and learning and loving. He always remembered everything he encountered;
his memory was perfect, like his eyes and ears. Why not? It pained him to see how other humans lived in
dimness and distraction and he tried to help.
“See,” he said tenderly to the brown man’s girl, “each branchlet has one drop of sap frozen on the
tip of the bud. That makes a warming lens. It is called photothermal sap; without it the tree cannot grow.”
The brown man’s girl looked, but she turned out to be a strange tense girl preoccupied with hurtful
things. She became preoccupied also with Vivyan’s body and he did all he could for her, very enjoyably.
And then she and some of the others weren’t around any more and it was time to move on.
He didn’t expect to see the brown man again. But some while later in the cantinas of McCarthy’s
World he did. McCarthy’s World was the best yet—its long bright beaches, the hidden marvels of its
reefs by day and unending welcome in its nights. He had a special friend here too, a marine zoologist who
lived up the coast beyond the Terran Enclave. Vivyan never went into the Enclave. His life was in the
combers or drifting through the redolent cantinas, moving with the music and the friendly flow. Young
people from countless Terran worlds came to McCarthy’s beaches and many short, excitable spacers on
leave from the Terran base and even a few real aliens.
As always, arms and lips opened to him and he smiled patiently at the voices without hearing the
words that his memory could not help recording. It was while he was being harangued by one of the
spacers that Vivyan saw white owl-eyes watching from the shadows. It was the brown man. A new girl
was with him now.
The spacer pulled at him, inexplicably and drunkenly outraged. Something about the natives of
McCarthy’s World. Vivyan had never seen one. He longed to. His friend had told him they were very
shy.
And there was something negative connected with them which he did not want to know. It was tied
in some way to a large badness—the lost third planet whose name Vivyan did not recall. Once, he knew,
all these three worlds, Horl and McCarthy’s and the nameless one, had been all together and all friendly
until the wrong thing had occurred. Terrans were hurt. A pity. Vivyan did not probe into negative, angry
things.
He smiled and nodded gently at the spacer, longing to share with him the reality of sunlight on the
reef, quietness in the wind, love. The brown man was as before, remote. Not in need. Vivyan stretched
and let arms pull him out to fly firekites on the murmuring beaches.
On another evening they were all linked in a circle singing one of the aliens’ songs when the brown
man’s girl began to sing to him with slow intensity across the shadows. Vivyan saw she was a delicate
cool girl like the fire-lace on the reefs and hoped she would come to him soon. When she sought him out
next day he learned that her name was Nantli. To his delight she spoke very little. Her eyes and her
red-gold body made him feel enveloped in sun-foam.
“Beautiful Vivyan.” Her hands traced him shyly. He smiled his innocent pirate’s smile. People always
said that, it seemed to be their way of making him feel good. They didn’t understand that he always felt
good. It was part of his way to be, natural that his long olive body was strong and that his beard curled
joyfully. Why did other people hurt themselves so?