"Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn - The Meaning Of The Word" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yarbro Chelsea Quinn)

"It looks like you've wasted your trip, Peter," Almrid said to me, a certain morose satisfaction in this statement. "Why don't you ride up tonight and forget it? There are other planets."

I wondered if my disappointment showed so much.

"I think I'll stick around for a while," I said.




· · · · ·


"I don't know, Sumiko," I was saying as we watched the second skiff settle onto the sand. "I can't give up the thought that there's something here."
Absently she made some answer.

"Don't you feel that?"

"I suppose so." She was only half-listening. This world was too unknown, too compelling for us to pay much attention to each other. Every one of us saw it through his/her eyes only. "Is any of this real, Peter?" she asked. "Or is the planet hiding from us?"

I had felt that from the first. Something was hidden here right under our noses and we hadn't the sense to find it. But all I could do was shrug. I didn't know then what she wanted to find, what it was she had been searching for with that terrible, fragile intensity that marked her more than her beauty.

"What do you want to find?" she asked me.

"Oh, I don't know." It was a lie and, like a lot of lies, it felt ugly. But I couldn't admit to her that I had longed for the chance to find a lost civilization here, to be the first to decipher its language. People could be known and understood by the way they used words, and to be the first to understand in that way had been an obsession with me since before I trained on the Probe Ship Magalhaes.

"You're going to do some exploring later?" It wasn't really a question, it was a dismissal.

"Whenever Almrid and Wolton get tired of fighting and give a general release, then, yes, I'll go exploring." Neither of them was willing to stop feuding long enough to let the expedition get moving and I was becoming riled at the delay. But Commander Markham would be in the next skiff and, knowing Josh, he would put an end to the sparring that had taken up too much time already.

"Good luck," she murmured and went back to her equipment. Then, as she started adjusting the sample breakdowns, her voice sounded again in my earphones. "Why wait? Why not do what you want to do?"




· · · · ·


By the time the base camp had been set up and the full complement of expedition staff had been ferried down the surface shelters were waiting. I had spent the long afternoon struggling with ring supports, emplacing the doughnut-shaped foundations for the inflatable buildings, but now it was night.
I walked away from the camp, watching the unfamiliar sky. There were more and brighter stars above me and some eleven dissimilar moons coursed overhead in a bewildering tangle.

In a while I found the irregular stone, although I had not consciously been looking for it—I had been drawn to it as surely as fur draws static. I knew that it would tell me what I wanted to know, if only I could puzzle it out before Captain Tamoshoe ordered us all back to the Nordenskjold. Yet, as I stood over it, not knowing where to look or what I was looking for, I could still mock myself for being so obsessed with wanting to find a language and a culture that obviously had failed in all this desolation.

So I paced the thing off nonchalantly. It was not too large, this oblong section of rock, rather like one of the old headstones in the landmark cemeteries.

I kneeled in the sand and rubbed at the side of the block—and touched what I thought at first was a flaw or chip in the surface. Curious, I bent closer, gently blowing the clinging dirt from the slab with my sweat valve, brushing the stone clear as I worked.

And then, there it was. Without any doubt, without any ambiguity, the glyphs appeared under my hands. I drew back to get a proper look at them.