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

amber-gold shimmering just beyond the dark edge of the world.
Five years ago, it had been born as a speck of golden light;
for five years it had slowly grown outward, opening up into
space like a fireflower. The various golden hues flowed and
changed colour as he watched; they rippled and seemed alive
with pattern and purpose. And then he had an astonishing
thought, astonishing because it happened to be true: Perhaps
the Golden Flower really was alive. If men could journey past
the stars, he thought, then surely other living things could as
well, things that might be like flowers or birds or
butterflies. Someday, if he became a pilot, he must ask these
strange creatures their names and tell them his own; he must
ask them if they ached when the stellar winds blew cold or
longed to join the great oceans of life which must flow outward
toward the end of the universe, that is, if the universe came
to an end instead of going on and on forever.
O blessed God! he prayed, how much farther was the Unreal
City? What if he missed it by sledding too far north or south?
Haidar had taught him to steer by the stars, and according to
the stories, the Unreal City lay due east of Kweitkel. He
looked off into the east, out across the starlit seascape. The
drift ice and snowfields gleamed faintly; dunes of new snow
rose up in sweeping, swirling shapes, half in silver-white and
half lost in shadow. It was very beautiful, the cold, sad,
fleeting beauty of shona-lara, the beauty that hints of death.
Now the midwinter storms would blow one after the other, and
snow would smother the iceblooms, which would die. And the
snowworms would starve, and the sleekits – those who weren't
quick
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enough to flee to the islands – would starve, too. The birds
would fly to miurasalia and the other islands of the north,
because very soon, after the storms were done, the harsh sun
would come out, and there would be no more snow or ice or
starvation because there would be nothing left to starve.
Later that day, at first light, he went out to hunt seals.
Each hooded seal – or ringed or grey seal – keeps many holes
open in the sea ice; the ice of the sea, east and west, is
everywhere pocked by their holes. But the holes are sometimes
scarce and irregularly spaced. Snow always covers them, making
them hard to find. Danlo leashed his best seal dog, Siegfried,
and together they zigzagged this way and that across the pearl
grey-snow. Siegfried, with his keen nose, should have been able
to sniff out at least a few seal holes. But their luck was bad,
and they found no holes that day. Nor the next day, nor the day
after that. On the forty-third morning of his journey, Danlo
decided that he must sled on, even though now he only had baldo
nuts to eat and the dogs had nothing. It was a hard decision.
He could stay and hope to find seals by searching the ice to
the north. But if he wasted too many days and found no seals,