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

THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE 27
were in high school in Port Angeles. Carla RezekЧ Never mind. It was wild and beautiful and hopeless."
"And it hurts yet, doesn't it?" Dagny murmured.
His grin flickered. "Mainly I cherish certain memories. Carla went on to marry and move elsewhere; I've lost track and she hasn't tried to get back in touch, being the good people she is. Her folks were less tolerant than yours; they got her well and thoroughly away from me, but on religious grounds they didn't countenance abortion. When the baby was born, it was adopted out. Neither Carla nor I were told where. Back then, that sort of incident was no great rarity, no enormous deal. Besides, I soon went off to college, and on to foreign parts."
"Till at lastЧ"
"Yeah. I came back, not to stay but to revisit the old scenes, well-heeled and ... wondering."
The girl flushed. "Auntie?"
"Oh, Juliana knew, and in fact urged me to try and find out. I might have a responsibility, she said. A detective followed up some easy clues and located the Stambaughs in Aberdeen. It wasn't hard to scrape up an acquaintance. I never meant to intrude, you realize, just be a friend, so I kept mum and swear you to the same. Wouldn't have told you, either, if I could've avoided it. Among other things, the secret will be a burden on you, because I can't very well show you any favoritism if you elect a Fireball career. Space is too unforgiving. This day, however, well, you have a pretty clear need to know. For your heart's sake, anyhow."
Dagny blinked hard. "UncansЧ"
Guthrie cut back to years agone. "Helen was growing up a charming little lady. Shortly after, she married. We're a headlong breed in that regard, it seems. YouЧMe, in my fifties, you're about to make a great-grandfather of me!" Brief laughter boomed.
"AndЧand you'll make of meЧ"
"Nothing, sweetheart. All we offer is a chance for you to make of yourself whatever you will and can."
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They talked onward, until the cold drove them to walk farther. The sun had gone low. It was still no more than a brightening behind the cloud deck, but a few rays struck through to kindle the waters.
He who sometimes called himself Venator was also known, to those who had a need to know, as an officer in the secret service of the World Federation Peace Authority. In truthЧfor the ultimate truths about a human are in the spiritЧhe was a huntsman.
In late mornwatch of a certain day on the Moon, he finished his business with one Aiant and left the Lunarian's dwelling. After the twilight, birdsong, white blooms, and vaulted ceiling of the roota where they had spoken, the passage outside glared at him. Yet it too was a place of subtle curves, along which colors flowed and intertwined, ocher, mauve, rose, amber, smoke. At intervals stood planters where aloes, under this gravity, lifted their stalks out of spiky clusters as high as his head, to flower like fireworks six meters aloft. The breeze had a smell as of fresh-cut grass, with a tinge of something sharper, purely chemical. He could barely hear the music in it, fluting on a scale unknown to Earth, but his blood responded to a subsonic drumbeat.
Few others were afoot. This being a wealthy section, some went sumptuous of tunic and hose or sweeping gown, while the rest were retainers of this or that household, in livery not much less fine. One led a Siamese-marked cat on a leashЧmetamorphic, its genes transformed through generations to make it of tiger size. All moved with the same grace and aloofness as the animal. A pair who were talking in their melodious language did so very softly.
They were doubtless a little surprised by the hunts-
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man. Terrans seldom came here, and he was obviously not one who lived on their world but from Earth. Under the former Selenarchy his kind had been debarred from entering the neighborhood at all except by special permission. However, nobody said or did anything, though the big eyes might narrow a bit.
He could have given them back those looks, and not always upward. Many Lunarians were no taller than a tall Terran, which he was. He refrained. A huntsman on the hunt draws no needless attention to himself. Let them glance, inwardly shrug, and forget him.
What they'saw was a man lithe and slender, in his mid-thirties, with light-brown skin, deep-brown eyes, and black hair a woolcap on a head long and high. The 'features were sharp, nose broad and arched, lips thinner than usual for his ethnotype. Clad in a plain gray coverall and soft boots, he carried at his hip a case that might have held a hand-size computer, a satellite-range phone, or even a medic, but which in fact bore something much more potent. His gait was unhurried, efficient, well practiced in low-weight.
It soon took him from the district of old and palatial apartments, through another and humbler inhabited mainly by his species, on into the commercial core of the city. Three-story arcades on plume-like pillars lined Tsiolkovsky Prospect, duramoss yielded underfoot, illusions drifted through the ceiling far overhead. Here there were more folk. Most of the Lunarians wore ordinary garments, although their styles of itЧupward-flared collars, short cloaks, dagged skirts, pectoral sunbursts, insignia of phyle or family, colors, iridescences, inset glitterlights, details more fanciful stillЧwould have been florid were it not as natural on them as brilliance on a coral snake. Three men came by together, their walk and posture, black kilts and silver-filigree breastplates, comparatively brusque manner and loud speech, said they were from Mars. Asterites were scarce and less readily identifiable.
Terrans numbered perhaps three out of ten. Some
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POUL ANDERSON
declared themselves Lunar citizens by some version of Lunarian garb, often the livery of a seigneurial house. Others stayed with Earthside fashions, but one could see by their carriage and by tokens more slight that they were citizens too, or at least long-term residents. Among themselves both kinds used ancestral tongues, unless Lunarian was all that they had in common.
About a third of the Terrans were here from Earth on assorted errands. Tourists were conspicuous by their rarity as well as their awkwardness and stares. Why trouble to come for pleasure when you could have the experience more easily and cheaply in a quivira? Your brain would register and remember the same sensations.
These people were too sparse to be a crowd. Half the shops, restaurants, bistros, bagnios, amusement specialties, and cultural enterprises in the arcades stood closed and vacant. Background noise was a susurrus through which a gust of music would twang startlingly strong or a drift of perfume entice the nostrils. A conversation ahead of him resounded clearly as the huntsman drew near.
"Чsick of being second-class, all my life second-class. So far can 1 go, so much can I achieve, then I strike the invisible wall and everything begins to happen in such ways that nothing further is possible for me."
The language, Neudeutsch, was among those the net had implanted in the huntsman. He slowed his pace. Familiar though the complaint was, he might possibly get a little useful input.
Two sat at a street-level table outside an otherwise empty caffi tended by a robot. The speaker was plainly a Terran Moondweller, though he wore a Han Revival robe in a forlorn sort of defiance. He was as well-muscled as if he lived on Earth; perhaps he worked off rage with extra exercise. The skin stood taut on his knuckles where he gripped a tumbler. His companion, in a unisuit, was just as plainly a visiting European.
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She sipped her own drink and murmured, "Not quite all your life."
"No, of course not. But we've lived here for two hundred years, my family." The man tossed off a gulp. His words tumbled forth. "My parents went back to Earth only to have us, my siblings and me." Evidently it had been a multiple conception, three or four zygotes induced, to spare having to repeat the whole expensive timespan. Probably, the huntsman thought, gestation had been uterine, to save the cost of exogenesis. "As soon as we were developed enough, they returned with us. Nine months plus three years they were gone. Should that have lost them what miserable employment they had? Should the need make us aliens, inferiors? The law says no. But what floes the law count for? What is this damned Republic but the same old Selenarchy, in a disguise so thin it's an insult?"
"Calm, please be calm. Once the Habitat is ready, things will soon become very different."
"Will they? Can they? The SelenarchsЧ"
"The magnates will be overwhelmed, obsolete, irrelevant, within a decade, I promise you. Meanwhile, the opportunitiesЧ"
The huntsman went past. He had heard nothing new after all. The woman was involved in one or another of the consortiums already searching out potentials for the Moon of the future. Perhaps she had some use for the man, perhaps he was merely a chance-met talkmate. It didn't matter.
What did matter was that that future lay in danger of abortion.
Despite the service centers at Hydra Square, the fountain in the middle of the plaza splashed through its silvery twinings and fractals alone. The door of the constabulary retracted to let a uniformed officer in and a couple of civilians out, otherwise the fish below the clear paving swam about nobody's feet but the huntsman's. No paradox, though Tychopolis be the largest of the Lunar cities. Here, too, automatons,
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robots, and sophotects increasingly took over such tasks as medical care, maintenance, and rescue, while the population requiring those attentions declined. He expected the area would again be thronged once the settlers from Earth had established themselves (for however long that would last, a few centuries, a few millennia, a blink in time for the Teramind but long enough in human reckoning). Unless their hopes died beneath the claws of the Selenarchs.
No, he thought, have done with those ideas. He had found no evidence of any widespread conspiracy. It seemed he had an adversary more capable than that, brewing a menace less combatable.
He never knew fear. An organism born to be brave had learned self-mastery on St. Helena and gone on into the cybercosm. But when he considered what might come of this, a thousand years hence or a million, bleakness touched him.
Resolution resurged. He willed nonsanity away. Rationally estimated, the odds were high in favor of his cause. Let him proceed, and the future "he had imagined would be one that he aborted.
BesidesЧa smile played brieflyЧhe expected to enjoy his quest.
From the square he went on down Oberth Passage. Industry, computation, biotech, molecular, and quantum operations proceeded in busy silence behind its walls. Something was not perfectly shielded, and a stray electromagnetic pulse happened to resonate with the net inside his skull. Memories sprang up unbidden, dawn over a wind-rippled veldt; the face of a preceptor in the Brain Garden, dream-distorted. He leaped out of the influence and regained himself.