The Stone Canal [antikvár]

Human EquivalentHe vs^oke, and remembered dying.His eyes and mouth opened and he drew in a long harsh gasp of thin air. His legs kicked and his fingers rasped the sand. Then his limbs sprawled and he lay still. Each breath came quickly, as if he suspected that the next would be his last. His fingers hooked the soil as he stared upwards at a deep-blue, fathomless sky.He rolled over and clambered to his feet and looked around. He was standing on the lower slope of a low knoll above a canal. The canal was about twenty metres wide. For a few hundred metres on either side of it, the ground was sparsely covered with grass and shrubs. Beyond that the ground was a reddish colour.The man looked back and forth along the canal. It ran from horizon to horizon, a line of blue along the middle of a band of green, bisecting the great circle of red beneath a dome of blue. Near the top of the sky a sun shone bright and small; the man looked up at it, then raised his arm with his thumb up as if in a greeting. He moved his fist with the extended thumb back and forth, sighting along his arm with one eye. He smiled and nodded.A few metres up-slope from where he stood, the hillside was broken, exposing the rock beneath the thin layer of soil and roots. Among the tumbled, jagged boulders lay an ellipsoid pod a metre long, half a metre across and twenty-five centimetres deep. Its upper and lower halves were identical, and reflective; between them was a sort of equatorial band where duller, hinged or jointed surfaces could be seen. The man stepped up and examined it with a wary look. Then he stooped closer, in an intent inspection, and abruptly turned away.He ran down to the edge of the canal and stood gazing into it for some minutes. He took off his clothes - boots and socks, a padded