Stephen Baxter - Huddle

VIP免费
2024-11-23 0 0 43.92KB 17 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Stephen%20Baxter%20-%20Huddle.txt
STEPHEN BAXTER
HUDDLE
HIS BIRTH WAS VIOLENT. He was expelled from warm red-dark into black and white
and cold, a cold that dug into his flesh immediately.
He hit a hard white surface and roiled onto his back.
He tried to lift his head. He found himself inside a little fat body, gray fur
soaked in a ruddy liquid that was already freezing.
Above him there was a deep violet-blue speckled with points of light, and two
gray discs. Moons. The word came from nowhere, into his head. Moons, two of
them.
There were people with him, on this surface. Shapeless mounds of fat and fur
that towered over him. Mother. One of them was his mother. She was speaking to
him, gentle wordless murmurs.
He opened his mouth, found it clogged. He spat. Air rushed into his lungs, cold,
piercing.
Tenderly his mother licked mucus off his face.
But now the great wind howled across the ice, unimpeded. It grew dark. A flurry
of snow fell across him.
His mother grabbed him and tucked him into a fold of skin under her belly. He
crawled onto her broad feet, to get off the ice. There was bare skin here, thick
with blood vessels, and he snuggled against its heat gratefully. And there was a
nipple, from which he could suckle.
He could feel the press of other people around his mother, adding their warmth.
He slept, woke, fed, slept again, barely disturbed by his mother's shuffling
movements.
The sharp urgency of the cold dissipated, and time dissolved.
He could hear his mother's voice, booming through her big belly. She spoke to
him, murmuring; and, gradually, he learned to reply, his own small voice piping
against the vast warmth of her stomach. She told him her name -- No-Sun -- and
she told him about the world: people and ice and rock and food. "Three winters:
one to grow, one to birth, one to die..." Birth, sex and death. The world, it
seemed, was a simple place.
The cold and wind went on, unrelenting. Perhaps it would go on forever.
She told him stories, about human beings.
"...We survived the Collision," she said. "We are surviving now. Our purpose is
to help others. We will never die..." Over and over.
To help others. It was good to have a purpose, he thought. It lifted him out of
the dull ache of the cold, that reached him even here.
He slept as much as he could.
No-Sun pulled her broad feet out from under him, dumping him onto the hard ice.
It was like a second birth. The ice was dazzling white, blinding him. Spring.
The sun was low to his right, its light hard and flat, and the sky was a deep
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Stephen%20Baxter%20-%20Huddle.txt (1 of 17) [10/18/2004 5:30:18 PM]
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Stephen%20Baxter%20-%20Huddle.txt
blue-black over a landscape of rock and scattered scraps of ice. On the other
horizon, he saw, the land tilted up to a range of mountains, tall, blood-red in
the light of the sun. The mountains were to the west of here, the way the sun
would set; to the east lay that barren plain; it was morning, here on the ice.
East. West. Morning. Spring. The words popped into his head, unbidden.
There was an austere beauty about the world. But nothing moved in it, save human
beings.
He looked up at his mother. No-Sun was a skinny wreck; her fur hung loose from
her bones. She had spent herself in feeding him through the winter, he realized.
He tried to stand. He slithered over the ice, flapping ineffectually at its hard
surface, while his mother poked and prodded him.
There was a sound of scraping.
The people had dispersed across the ice. One by one they were starting to
scratch at the ice with their long teeth. The adults were gaunt pillars, wasted
by the winter. There were other children, little fat balls of fur like himself.
He saw other forms on the ice: long, low, snow heaped up against them, lying
still. Here and there fur showed, in pathetic tufts.
"What are they?"
His mother glanced apathetically. "Not everybody makes it."
"I don't like it here."
She laughed, hollowly, and gnawed at the ice. "Help me."
After an unmeasured time they broke through the ice, to a dark liquid beneath.
Water.
When the hole was big enough, No-Sun kicked him into it.
He found himself plunged into dark fluid. He tried to breathe, and got a
mouthful of chill water. He panicked, helpless, scrabbling. Dark shapes moved
around him.
A strong arm wrapped around him, lifted his head into the air. He gasped
gratefully.
He was bobbing, with his mother, in one of the holes in the ice. There were
other humans here, their furry heads poking out of the water, nostrils flaring
as they gulped in air. They nibbled steadily at the edges of the ice.
"Here's how you eat," No-Sun said. She ducked under the surface, pulling him
down, and she started to graze at the underside of the ice, scraping at it with
her long incisors. When she had a mouthful, she mushed it around to melt the
ice, then squirted the water out through her big, overlapping molars and
premolars, and munched the remnants.
He tried to copy her, but his gums were soft, his teeth tiny and ineffective.
"Your teeth will grow," his mother said. "There's algae growing in the ice. See
the red stuff?"
He saw it, like traces of blood in the ice. Dim understandings stirred.
"Look after your teeth."
file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Stephen%20Baxter%20-%20Huddle.txt (2 of 17) [10/18/2004 5:30:18 PM]
Stephen Baxter - Huddle.pdf

共17页,预览2页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：17 页 大小：43.92KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-11-23

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 动力学连接体 力的合成 配电装置 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 17
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注