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Crashlander :: Нивен Ларри
Страница: 1 из 199Аннотация: Crashlander Beowulf Shaeffer has long been one of the most popular characters in Known Space. Now, for the first time ever, Larry Niven brings together all the Beowulf Shaeffer stories-including a brand-new one-in one long tale of exploration and adventure! PLUS-an all-new framing story that pulls together all of Beowulf Shaeffer's adventures and allows Shaeffer and his family to make a clean start at life once and for all!
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CRASHLANDER
by Larry Niven
GHOST: ONE
We had wonderful seats ten rows back from the glass.
Two hundred feet below the ocean's surface sunlight flooded down through seaweed forests in a thousand flickering golden beams. Players swirled in shoals among the forest roots like half a hundred color-coded fighting fish.
Grandstands had been set against the city dome. Beyond the glass was the playing domain for ten color-marked teams, each team being five humans and a dolphin. Sixty players, down to fifty now, the humans using breathers and oversized fins.
The prey were local life-forms, three flattened turtles armed with hind flippers as wide as wings. Their painted shells glowed like captured suns, red, yellow, violet. The point was to move the prey through the arches, paraboloids painted in the same blazing colors. A player might pull a prey against his chest to swim with it, or hold it at arm's length and steer by the strength of his arms while the prey did the work, or even leave it swimming toward the sand during a melee, hopmg a teammate could get it before it disappeared.
Sharrol was entranced. When a swarm of Entertainment Guild Players carried the violet prey through the violet arch, she bellowed with the rest.
I don't understand water war. She watched the game; I watched her.
Sharrol was dressed Shashter style, a fancy cloak over a body stocking with windows in it that would serve for swimming. She was small even by flatlander standards, beginning to bulge with our second child. Strong jaw, pale skin, straight black hair: the real Sharrol. On Earth she'd worn many fantastic images, in flatlander style.
For too long fear had lurked beneath her surface emotions. Sharrol wasn't made for this world. But we'd lived beneath Fafnir's world-spanning ocean for a year and a half, we'd conceived and birthed Jeena and started a sister for her, and we'd come to see this place as our own. Gradually the fear had been etched away. I saw no sign of it now. Sharrol was at home.
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CRASHLANDER
by Larry Niven
GHOST: ONE
We had wonderful seats ten rows back from the glass.
Two hundred feet below the ocean's surface sunlight flooded down through seaweed forests in a thousand flickering golden beams. Players swirled in shoals among the forest roots like half a hundred color-coded fighting fish.
Grandstands had been set against the city dome. Beyond the glass was the playing domain for ten color-marked teams, each team being five humans and a dolphin. Sixty players, down to fifty now, the humans using breathers and oversized fins.
The prey were local life-forms, three flattened turtles armed with hind flippers as wide as wings. Their painted shells glowed like captured suns, red, yellow, violet. The point was to move the prey through the arches, paraboloids painted in the same blazing colors. A player might pull a prey against his chest to swim with it, or hold it at arm's length and steer by the strength of his arms while the prey did the work, or even leave it swimming toward the sand during a melee, hopmg a teammate could get it before it disappeared.
Sharrol was entranced. When a swarm of Entertainment Guild Players carried the violet prey through the violet arch, she bellowed with the rest.
I don't understand water war. She watched the game; I watched her.
Sharrol was dressed Shashter style, a fancy cloak over a body stocking with windows in it that would serve for swimming. She was small even by flatlander standards, beginning to bulge with our second child. Strong jaw, pale skin, straight black hair: the real Sharrol. On Earth she'd worn many fantastic images, in flatlander style.
For too long fear had lurked beneath her surface emotions. Sharrol wasn't made for this world. But we'd lived beneath Fafnir's world-spanning ocean for a year and a half, we'd conceived and birthed Jeena and started a sister for her, and we'd come to see this place as our own. Gradually the fear had been etched away. I saw no sign of it now. Sharrol was at home.