"Robert F. Young - The Last Yggdrasill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

now, it overwhelmed you. Its foliage was a great, green cloud, its trunk a bleak, black cliff.
Ever since the tree crew's arrival, Strong had been unable to get the tree out of his mind. Everywhere
he went, the tree went with him. He knew he was afraid, but he knew also that his fear did not wholly
account for the tree's omnipresence, for he was always afraid before a felling. There was another factor
involved. It was as though the tree were indivisible from the village, from the vast grain-covered plain,
from the planet itself. Certainly it was indivisible from his future.
Properly speaking, the village square was a circle, but the colonists who had expropriated the
enchanting houses surrounding it and who comprised the Triumvirate-subsidized Co-operative did not
think of it as such. Strong did not think of it as such either. Villages do not have circles at their centers,
even when they circle the circles; even when their streets radiate from them like the spokes of a wheel.
Villages, traditionally, have squares. Ergo, Strong was standing in the village square.
The colonists had named the village Bigtree, and they had named the territory in the midst of which it
stood Kansasia. They had named themselves too. They called themselves The Reapers, a term inspired
less by the wheat they harvested than by the money it brought in. They also referred to themselves as The
Chosen People. It was true they had not been chosen by God, but they had been chosen by the
Triumvirate, which amounted to almost the same thing.
The rays of Genji the sun, absent from the square since early morning, were beginning to bathe it
once again. The Reapers had long ago leveled the Quantextil burial mounds and had seeded the entire
area with grass that was guaranteed to grow in shade, but you could see where the mounds had been
because the grass grew greener there. The Reapers had also removed the big birdfeeder in which the
Quantextil had fed the birds in winter and perhaps during the rest of the year too, and which had rotted
into ruin, but they had allowed the huge stone birdbath to remain. Probably they did not consider the bath
to be an inducement for the baba birds to remain, whereas the feeder, had they replaced it with a new
one and put feed in it, would have been.
Strong could hear the birds. A few minutes ago a flock of them had winged in from the plain. The
birds lived exclusively in the tree and had managed to survive not only the cold months of winter but the
war of sticks and stones and acoustical nightmares the Reapers had been waging against them. Now that
the tree was destined to die, the war was over, for the tree was the last tree, and when it died the haha
birds were doomed.
Strong looked up, up, up into the branches above him, and it was like looking up at the vaulted dome
of a cathedral. He could feel the damp coolness of the tree's transpiration. And he could feel his fear. It
was a bleak fear—a cold, foreboding temple in the green atmosphere of his thoughts. And he could feel
something else. A thought that was not his own? It did not seem to be a thought, and yet it must be.
It was couched in words: When I die, you die too.

He turned his back on the tree and began walking out of the square. The tree walked with him. To
his left stood the Bigtree Hotel, where he and the rest of the tree crew were the only guests. But he did
not go there; instead he entered one of the radiating streets and began walking toward the outskirts of the
village. The street was one of those that lay beneath the projected airhauler route, and the houses lining it
had been vacated. They were exquisite houses, as were all the houses in the village. It was as though art
and architecture had joined hands to create them. To look at one of them was to want to live in it. The
natural finish of the wood that comprised the houses glowed with a subdued golden light. Strong could
see into some of the backyards. Gaudy lawn furniture struck a discordant note. The small stone birdbaths
the Quantextil had left behind in each yard had been converted into charcoal braziers. The Reapers did
not like to be reminded that their houses were not nearly as new as they seemed, that for years, perhaps
centuries, they bad been occupied by ignorant indigenes who worried about the welfare of the haha
birds. The Reapers flatly refused to believe AnthropoCo's conclusion that the Quantextil had built the
houses. A race that had preceded the Quantextil, a civilized race, had done the building, they
maintained. Their cathexis with respect to civilization was certainly understandable enough. They had
been selected for the colony by the branch of the Triumvirate known as the Multinational Office of