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.The barge tipped sideways;then, like a living creature, it seemed to find its center of balance, and dropped back down into atrough between waves.The water rising around them seemed pulsingly alive with blue light.It was alive, it was electrically active, radiant and throbbingly, brilliantly, vital.All the sounds of sea and ship and exploding shells abruptly stopped.In perfect silence and anabsolute blue glow, they passed through.Renie’s first thought was that they were caught in the timeless instant of an explosion, stuck inthe dreary heart of a quantum event that would never end.The bright light, more white than bluenow, dazzled her so that she had to shut her eyes against the pain.When she carefully opened them a moment later, the light was still there, but she realized it wasonly the brilliance of an ordinary daytime sky.They had left the night behind them in Temilún.Her second thought was that the last explosion had blown the entire top off the barge.They stillbobbed on the water, and the coastline – now revealed in crystal-clear daylight and full ofstartlingly huge trees as wide and tall as skyscrapers – was very visible, but there was no longer arailing to look over.Renie realized she was on her knees, clutching at something curving and fibrous and as thick asher arm that stretched where the railing had been.She dragged herself around so she could lookback at where the rest of the barge had been, the wheel-house, the royal apartment.Her companions were lying in the center of something that was large and flat, but otherwisenothing like a barge – something ribbed and dimpled like a giant piece of modern sculpture,something that curled at the edges and was as stiffly yielding as crocodile hide beneath Renie’shand.“!Xabbu?” she said.“Are you all right?”“We have all survived.” He still wore his baboon body.“But we.”Renie lost the rest of his sentence in a growing drone from somewhere above.She stared at theflat expanse upon which they all lay, at the almost ragged shape of its edges where they curledup from the water, and realized what the thing they were floating on looked like.Not a boat atall, but.“A.leaf ?”The droning was growing louder and louder, making it hard to think.The huge trees on thedistant shoreline.It made a sort of sense, then – they were not a trick of distortion and distance.But was the place itself too large, or were she and her companions.?The sound rattled in her ears.Renie looked up to see something the size of a single-engineairplane glide overhead, hover for a moment so that the wind almost knocked her flat, and thenspeed away again, wings glinting like stained glass in the bright, bright sun.It was a dragonfly.Jeremiah found him going through the cabinets in the kitchen for perhaps the dozenth time,looking for something that both of them knew was not there.“Mr.Sulaweyo?”Renie’s father tugged open another door and began shoving industrial-sized cans and heatsealed ration packs out of his way, working with ragged intensity.When he had cleared a hole,he reached in until his armpit was pressing into the front of the shelf and groped in the darknessat the back of the cabinet.“Mr.Sulaweyo.Joseph.”He turned to stare at Jeremiah, his eyes red-rimmed.“What you want?”“I want a little help.I’ve been sitting at the console for hours.If you’ll take a turn, I can make ussomething to eat.”“Don’t want nothing to eat.” Long Joseph turned back to his search.After a moment he cursed,retracted his arm, then began the same process on the next shelf down.“You don’t have to eat, then, but I do.In any case, that’s your daughter in that tank, not mine.”A canister of soy meal tipped off the shelf and thumped onto the floor.Long Joseph continuedto scrabble in the space at the back of the shelf.“Don’t you tell me about my daughter.I knowwho’s in that tank.”Jeremiah Dako made a noise of angry frustration and turned to go.He stopped in the doorway.“I’m not going to sit there forever staring at those screens.I can’t.And when I fall asleep,nobody will be checking their heart rates, nobody will be watching in case the tanks go wrong.”“God damn !” A line of plastic sacks slid off the shelf and toppled.One broke, puffing asulfurous spray of powdered egg across the cement floor.“God damn this place!” Long Josephswept more sacks from the shelf, then muscled a can up over his head and flung it down so hardit bounced before coming to rest against the rear wall.An ooze of syrup trickled from beneaththe crumpled lid.“What the hell kind of place is this?” he shouted [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.The barge tipped sideways;then, like a living creature, it seemed to find its center of balance, and dropped back down into atrough between waves.The water rising around them seemed pulsingly alive with blue light.It was alive, it was electrically active, radiant and throbbingly, brilliantly, vital.All the sounds of sea and ship and exploding shells abruptly stopped.In perfect silence and anabsolute blue glow, they passed through.Renie’s first thought was that they were caught in the timeless instant of an explosion, stuck inthe dreary heart of a quantum event that would never end.The bright light, more white than bluenow, dazzled her so that she had to shut her eyes against the pain.When she carefully opened them a moment later, the light was still there, but she realized it wasonly the brilliance of an ordinary daytime sky.They had left the night behind them in Temilún.Her second thought was that the last explosion had blown the entire top off the barge.They stillbobbed on the water, and the coastline – now revealed in crystal-clear daylight and full ofstartlingly huge trees as wide and tall as skyscrapers – was very visible, but there was no longer arailing to look over.Renie realized she was on her knees, clutching at something curving and fibrous and as thick asher arm that stretched where the railing had been.She dragged herself around so she could lookback at where the rest of the barge had been, the wheel-house, the royal apartment.Her companions were lying in the center of something that was large and flat, but otherwisenothing like a barge – something ribbed and dimpled like a giant piece of modern sculpture,something that curled at the edges and was as stiffly yielding as crocodile hide beneath Renie’shand.“!Xabbu?” she said.“Are you all right?”“We have all survived.” He still wore his baboon body.“But we.”Renie lost the rest of his sentence in a growing drone from somewhere above.She stared at theflat expanse upon which they all lay, at the almost ragged shape of its edges where they curledup from the water, and realized what the thing they were floating on looked like.Not a boat atall, but.“A.leaf ?”The droning was growing louder and louder, making it hard to think.The huge trees on thedistant shoreline.It made a sort of sense, then – they were not a trick of distortion and distance.But was the place itself too large, or were she and her companions.?The sound rattled in her ears.Renie looked up to see something the size of a single-engineairplane glide overhead, hover for a moment so that the wind almost knocked her flat, and thenspeed away again, wings glinting like stained glass in the bright, bright sun.It was a dragonfly.Jeremiah found him going through the cabinets in the kitchen for perhaps the dozenth time,looking for something that both of them knew was not there.“Mr.Sulaweyo?”Renie’s father tugged open another door and began shoving industrial-sized cans and heatsealed ration packs out of his way, working with ragged intensity.When he had cleared a hole,he reached in until his armpit was pressing into the front of the shelf and groped in the darknessat the back of the cabinet.“Mr.Sulaweyo.Joseph.”He turned to stare at Jeremiah, his eyes red-rimmed.“What you want?”“I want a little help.I’ve been sitting at the console for hours.If you’ll take a turn, I can make ussomething to eat.”“Don’t want nothing to eat.” Long Joseph turned back to his search.After a moment he cursed,retracted his arm, then began the same process on the next shelf down.“You don’t have to eat, then, but I do.In any case, that’s your daughter in that tank, not mine.”A canister of soy meal tipped off the shelf and thumped onto the floor.Long Joseph continuedto scrabble in the space at the back of the shelf.“Don’t you tell me about my daughter.I knowwho’s in that tank.”Jeremiah Dako made a noise of angry frustration and turned to go.He stopped in the doorway.“I’m not going to sit there forever staring at those screens.I can’t.And when I fall asleep,nobody will be checking their heart rates, nobody will be watching in case the tanks go wrong.”“God damn !” A line of plastic sacks slid off the shelf and toppled.One broke, puffing asulfurous spray of powdered egg across the cement floor.“God damn this place!” Long Josephswept more sacks from the shelf, then muscled a can up over his head and flung it down so hardit bounced before coming to rest against the rear wall.An ooze of syrup trickled from beneaththe crumpled lid.“What the hell kind of place is this?” he shouted [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]