"David Zindell - Requiem of Homo Sapiens 01 - The Broken God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

logic.
When he grew frustrated with pure thought, he turned to
other pursuits. He spent most of three days carving a piece of
ivory into a likeness of the snowy owl. He told animal stories
to the dogs; he explained how Manwe, on the long tenth morning
of the world, had changed into the shape of the wolf, into
snowworm and sleekit, and then into the great white bear and
all the other animals. Manwe had done this magical thing in
order to truly understand the animals he must one day hunt.
And, too, because a man must know in his bones that his true
spirit was as mutable as ivory or clay. Danlo loved enacting
these stories. He was a wonderful mimic. He would get down on
all fours and howl like a wolf, or suddenly rear up like a
cornered bear, bellowing and swatting at the air. Sometimes he
frightened the dogs this way, for it was no fun merely to act
like a snow tiger or thallow or bear; he had to become these
animals in every nuance and attitude of his body – and in his
love of killing and blood. Once or twice he even frightened
himself, and if he had had a mirror or pool of water to gaze
into, it wouldn't have
48
surprised him to see fangs glistening inside his jaws, or fur
sprouting all white and thick across his wild face.
But perhaps his favourite diversion was the study of
mathematics. Often he would amuse himself drawing circles in
the hard-packed snow of his bed. The art of geometry he adored
because it was full of startling harmonies and beauty that
arose out of the simplest axioms. The wind shifted to the
northwest and keened for days, and he lay half out of his
sleeping furs, etching figures with his long fingernail. Jiro
liked to watch him scurf off a patch of snow; he liked to stick
his black nose into a mound of scraped-off powder, to sniff and
bark and blow the cold stuff all over Danlo's chest. (Like all
the Alaloi, Danlo slept nude. Unlike his near-brothers,
however, he had always found the snowhuts too cold for crawling
around without clothes, so he kept to his sleeping furs
whenever he could.) It was the dog's way of letting him know he
was hungry. Danlo hated feeding the dogs, not only because it
meant a separation from his warm bed, but because they were
steadily running out of food. It pained him every time he
opened another crackling, frozen packet of meat. He wished he
had had better luck spearing fatfish for the dogs because
fatfish were more sustaining than the lean shagshay meat and
seemed to last longer. Though, in truth, he loathed taking dogs
inside the hut whenever their only food was fish. It was bad
enough that the hut already stank of rotten meat, piss, and
dung. Having to scoop out the seven piles of dung which every
day collected in the tunnel was bad indeed, but at least the
dung was meat-dog-dung and not the awful smelling fish-dog-dung
that the dogs themselves were reluctant to sniff. Nothing in