"David Zindell - Shanidar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

"Here I freely admit I had underestimated him. I had supposed him to be a lunatic or at best, a
self-deluder who hadn't a chance of getting ten miles away from our city. The covenant between the
founder of Neverness and the Alaloi allows us this single island -- large though it might be --
and to our city fathers, this covenant is holy. Boats are useless because of the icebergs of the
Sound, and the windjammers of would-be poachers and smugglers are shot from the air. Because I
couldn't picture Goshevan walking out onto the Starnbergersee when it freezes over in deep winter,
I asked him somewhat smugly how he intended to find his Alaloi.

"'Dogs,' he said. 'I will attach dogs to a sled and let them pull me across the frozen sea.' And I
asked, 'What are dogs?' 'Dogs are carnivorous mammals from Old Earth,' he said. 'They are like
human slaves, only friendly and eager to please.' And I said, 'Oh, you mean huzgies,' which is
what the Alaloi call their sled dogs. I laughed at him then and watched the white skin beneath his
hairy face turn red as if slapped by a sudden cold wind. 'And how will you smuggle such beasts
into our city?' I asked him.

"So Goshevan parted the hair of his abdomen to show me a thin band of hard white skin I had taken


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for an appendectomy scar. 'Cut here,' he said, and after nerve-blocking him, cut I did until I
came to a strange looking organ adjoining the large intestine where his appendix should have been.
'It's a false ovary,' he said. 'Clever are the breeders of Darkmoon. Come. Cut again and see what
I've brought with me.' I removed the false organ, which was red and slippery and made of one of
those pungently sweet-smelling bioplastics they synthesize on Darkmoon. I made a quick incision
and out spilled thousands of unfertilized ova and a sac of sperm floating in krydda suspension to
keep them fresh and vital. He pointed at the milky sperm sac and said, 'The seed of Darkmoon's
finest Mutts. I had originally hoped to train hundreds of sled teams.'

"How Goshevan brought the dogs to term and trained them, I do not know because I didn't see him
again for two winters. I thought perhaps that he'd been caught and banished or had his head split
open and had his plasm sucked out by some filthy slel necker.

"But as you will see, Goshevan was a resourceful man and hard to kill. He came again to my shop on
the deepest of deep winter nights when the air was so black and cold that even on the greatest of
the glissades and glidderies, The Run and The Way, nothing moved. In the hallway of my shop he
stood like a white bear, opening his shagshay furs and removing the balaclava from his face with
powerful, sweeping motions. I could see beneath his furs one of those black and gold, heated
kamelaikas that the racers wear on festival days when they wish to keep warm and still have their
limbs free for stroking. 'This is my noble savage?' I said to him as I fingered his wonderfully
warm undersuit. 'Even a f-fanatic such as I must make some concessions to survival,' he said. And
I asked him. 'What will you do when the batteries die?' He gave me a look that was at once fearful
and bursting with excitement, and he said, 'When the batteries die, I will either be dead or I
will have found my home.'

"He said goodbye to me and went out onto the gliddery where his dogs were up on their hind legs,
straining at their harnesses as they whined and barked and pushed their black noses into his
parka. From my window, I could see him fumbling with the stiff leather straps and thumping the