"Williamson-DarkStarOne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

He reached for the radiophone, but stopped his hand when he saw that the object
ahead looked suddenly closer, too small for any kind of mountain. When it crept
into the heat lamp's glow, he saw that it was no monolithic obelisk of the ice
gods, but only a solitary boulder.

Yet it was itself a puzzle to him. What had tossed it here, so far from any
land, since the ocean froze? He steered closer for a better look. It was ice, a
dark mass the size of a car, jaggedly broken. Searching his small pool of dim
red light, he found nothing else except smaller fragments shattered off when it
fell. An ice meteorite, fallen a million years ago? Perhaps a billion?

Level frost, black sun, endless midnight, nada mas. He shrugged and drove on
again, just to the right of the round black blot. Frost that had never thawed
and never would. Stars that never changed. He blinked his aching eyes, his mind
drifting back to Cuerno del Oro. The flat-roofed adobes around the plaza, the
mud on the rutted streets when the rains came, the dust when they failed, the
old stone church where his mother took him to mass. He remembered the ragged
child he had been, bare feet numb and aching on frosty winter mornings when he
had to herd his father's goats over the rocky hills above the village.

His first promise of escape had come from Don Diego Morales, who returned for
the village fiestas and spoke of the starbirds that flew from the white sands in
el notre to scatter the human seed across the new and richer worlds that might
exist out among the stars.

"I'll learn to ride the star ships," he told the Don. "Cuando tengo suficiente
anos."

"Nunca." The lean old Don shook his head. "The stars want no stupid campesinos.
I am allowed to work at the launch site, but only at tasks too heavy or too
dirty for a gringo. No hay nada." He spat brown tobacco juice at a spider in the
dust. "They have no place for such as you."

"Pero yo --" he told the Don. "I will learn what the gringos learn and walk with
them among the stars."

Growing up in the village, he learned all he could at la escuela. He learned his
small ingles from the Don and the books the Don brought him from el norte. He
learned to repair and run an old computer the Don had brought him when the
Anglos threw it away, and saved his few pesos to pay for a new one.

Remembering, he felt glad la rubia could never know Cuerno del Oro, could never
feel the pain of life there, never smell the sewer ditch or swat the flies or
hear the hungry ninos crying. She would blame the people for what they could not
help, scorn him for an ignorant mojado --

Or was the thought unfair to her?

He remembered her brave joven hijo Kip, who had found him hiding on the ship,