"Anderson, Poul - Stars Are Also Fire, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

As the notes marched forth, as the liquor smoldered across tongue and into bloodstream, his eyes sought the portrait of Dagny Beynac and lingered. Always her figure had stood heroic before him. He wasn't sure why. Oh, he knew what she did, he had read three biographies and found remembrances everywhere on Luna; but others had also been great. Was it her association with Anson Guthrie? Or was it, in part, that she resembled his mother a little?
For the thousandth time, he considered her. The picture had been taken when she was in early middle age. She stood tall for an Earthborn woman, 180 centimeters, against the background of a conservatory where flowers grew extravagant under Lunar gravity. A sari and shawl clothed a form robust, erect, deep-bosomed. He knew from recordings that her gait was free-striding. Her features were a bit too strong for conventional beauty, broad across the high cheekbones, with slightly curved nose, full mouth, and rounded chin. Eyes wide-set and sea-blue looked straight from beneath hair that was thick and red, with overtones of bronze and gold, in bangs across the forehead and waves down to the jawline. After half a lifespan of sun and weather and radiation, her skin remained fair. He had heard her voice. It was low, with a trace of burrЧ"whisky tenor," she called it.
If her spirit, like Guthrie's, had stayed in the world until this day, what might the two of them not have wrought? But no, she ordered oblivion for herself. And she knew best. Surely, in her wisdom, she did.
Hard to believe that once she too was young,
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confused, helpless. Kenmuir found his imagination slipping pastward, as if he could see her then. It was a refuge from the present and the future. In the teeth of all fact and logic, he felt himself headed for worse trouble than anybody awaited.
The Mother of the Moon
It was always something of an event, reported in the local news media, when Anson and Juliana Guthrie .visited Aberdeen, Washington. Self-made billionaires weren't an everyday sight, especially in a small seaport, twice especially after the lumbering that had been the mainstay of adjacent Hoquiam dwindled away. Not that this pair made a production of their status. On the contrary, they took ordinary accommodations and throughout a stayЧusually brief, for their business would recall themЧ^they avoided public appearances as much as possible. Dignitaries and celebrities who tried for their company got more or less politely brushed off. Instead, the Guthries were together with the Stambaughs and, later, the Ebbesens. This too caused wonderment. What could they have in common with people who worked hard to earn a humble living?
"We hit it off, we enjoy each other, that's all," Guthrie once told a reporter. "My wife and I aren't silver-spoon types either, you know. Our backgrounds aren't so different from these folks'. We've known 'em for years now, and old friends are best, like old shoes, eh?" Those friends said much the same to anyone who asked. The community learned to accept the situation. As the political climate changed, envy of them diminished.
The relationship came to seem truly remarkable when the Guthries bet all they had on the Bowen laser launcher and founded Fireball Enterprises. Their fail-
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ure would have been almost as spectacular as their success was, if less meaningful. But after seven years their company dominated space activity near Earth and was readying ships to go harvest the wealth of the Solar System. Nevertheless they returned to Aberdeen every once in a while and were guests in the same small houses.
At last they even invited young Dagny Ebbesen to come along with them up the coast for a little vacation. Centuries later, lan Kenmuir could conjecture more shrewdly than her neighbors ever did what the real reason was and what actually went on.
In the beginning the girl drew strength and comfort more from the woman. Toward the end, though, Juliana drew her husband aside and murmured, "She needs to talk privately with you. Take her for a walk. A long one."
"Huh?" Anson raised his shaggy brows. "What makes you think so?"
"I don't think it, I feel it," Juliana replied. "She's fond of me; she worships you."
He harked back to their own daughterЧshe was in Quito, happily married, but he remembered certain desperate confidencesЧand after a moment nodded. "Okay. I dunno as how I rate that, but okay."
When he rumbled to Dagny, "Hey, you're looking as peaked as Mount Rainier. Let's get some salt air in you and some klicks behind you," she came aglow.
The resort was antiquated, shingle-walled cottages among trees. Across the crumbling road that ran past it, evergreen forest gloomed beneath a silver-gray sky and soughed in the wind. A staircase led down a bluff to a beach that right and left outreached vision. Below the heights and above the clear sand, driftwood lay tumbled, huge bleached logs, lesser fragments of trees and flotsam. Surf brawled white. Beyond it the waves surged in hues of iron. Where they hit a reef, they fountained. A few gulls rode the wind, which skirled bleak, bearing odors of sea and bite of spindrift. At
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POOL ANDERSON
this fall of the year and in these hard times, Guthrie's party had the place to themselves.
He and the girl turned north. For a while they trudged in silence. They made an odd pair, not only because of age. He was big and burly, his blunt visage furrowed beneath thinning reddish hair. Her own hair, uncovered, tossed in elflocks as the single brightness to see. Thus far she still walked slim and light-foot, her condition betrayed by no more than a fullness gathering in the breasts. Whenever she crossed a sprawl of kelp she popped a bladder or two under her heel. When she spied an intact sand dollar, she picked it up with a coo of pleasure. She was, after all, just sixteen.
"Here." She thrust it into Guthrie's hand. "For you, Uncans."
He accepted while asking, "Don't you want it yourself, a souvenir?"
She flushed. Her glance dropped. He barely heard: "Please. You and . .. and AuntieЧsomething to 'member me by."
"Well, thanks, Didd>4>oom." He gave her hand a quick squeeze, let go again, and dropped the disc into a jacket pocket. "Muchas gracias. Not that we're about to forget you anyhow."
The pet names blew away on the wind as though the wind were time, names from long ago when she toddled laughing to him and hadn't quite mastered "Uncle Anson." They walked for another span, upon the wet strip where the sea had packed and smoothed and darkened the sand. Water hissed from the breakers to lap near their feet.
"Please don't thank me!" she cried suddenly.
He threw her a pale-blue glance. "Why shouldn't I?"
Tears glimmered. "You've done so much for me, and I, I've never done anything for you. Can't I even give you a shell?"
"Of course you can, honey, and we'll give it a good home," he answered. "If you think you owe Juliana
THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 21
and me something, pay the debt forward; give somebody else who needs it a leg up someday." He paused. "But you don't owe, not really. We've gotten plenty enjoyment out of our honorary status. In fact, to us, for all practical purposes, you're family."
"Why?" she half challenged, half appealed. "What reason for it, ever?"
"Well," he said carefully, "I'm auld acquaintance with your parents, you know. Your mother since she was a sprat, and when your dad-to-be married her, I was delighted at what a catch she'd made. Juliana agreed." He ventured a grin. "I expected she'd call him a dinkum cobber, till she reminded me Aussies these days don't talk like that unless they're conning a tourist."
"But we, we're nobody."
"Nonsense. Your sort doesn't take handouts, nor need them. If I gave a bit of help, it was a business proposition."
Already in her life she knew otherwise. Helen Stambaugh's father had been master of a fishing boat till the fisheries failed. Guthrie put up the capital, as a silent partner, for him to start over with a charter cruiser that went up to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and around among the islands. For a while he prospered modestly. Sigurd Ebbesen, immigrant from Norway, became his mate, then presently his son-in-law, and then, with a further financial boost from Guthrie, a second partner captaining a second boat. But the venture collapsed when the North American economy in general did. The old man was able to take an austere retirement. Sigurd survived only because Guthrie persuaded various of his associates and employees that this was a pleasant way to spend some leisure time. However, Dagny, first child of two, must act as bull cook when school was out. She graduated to deckhand, then mate-cum-engineer, still unpaid, her eyes turned starward each night that was unclouded.
"No," she protested. "Not business, not really. You, you're just p-plain goodЧ"
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Her stammer ended. She swallowed a ragged breath, knuckled her eyes, and walked faster.
Guthrie matched the pace. He allowed her a hundred meters of quietness, except for the wind and surf and sea-mews, before he laid a hand on her shoulder and said, "Friends are friends. I don't gauge anybody's worth by their bank accounts. Been poor too damn often, myself, for that."
She jarred to a stop. *Tm sorry! I didn't meanЧ"
"Sure." A smile creased his face. "I know you that well, at least." He sighed "Wish it was better. If I could've seen you folks more than in far-apart snatchesЧ" It trailed away.
She mustered the calm, though fists clenched at her sides, to look straight at him and say almost levelly, "Then maybe you could've steered me off this mess I've gotten myself into? Is that what you're thinking, Uncans? Prob'ly you're right."
Again he smiled, one-sidedly. "You didn't get into it all by yourself, muchacha. You had enthusiastic help."
The color came and went in her cheeks. "Don't hate him. Please don't. He never would have if IЧI hadn'tЧ"