"Piers Anthony - Bio of a Space Tyrant 02 - Mercenary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anthony Piers)

I had to smile. The words did speak to my mood and my situation, and it was a pretty melody. Because the lines repeated, it was easy to remember.

"Now you try it," Rivers said.

Singing was not my forte, but I knew my voice was as good as those of a number of the other folk I had heard here, and I realized this performance was necessary if I was to be accepted into this group. I took a breath and sang, somewhat tremulously. "It takes a worried man to sing a worried song-"

At the second line, the others joined in, and it became much easier. They were careful not to drown me out; it was necessary that I be heard, that I set the cadence. By the time we got to the fourth line, it was rousing, and I felt it uplifting me. I really did feel better, physically and emotionally. I was part of the group, participating in a performing art. Surely this rendition would never be recorded as great music, but it was great, nevertheless.

Then Rivers sang the second verse-or maybe it was the first, for what we had sung before turned out to be the refrain, repeated after every regular verse.

I went across the river and I lay down to sleep. . . . When I awoke, there were shackles on my feet.

I had gone across the Jupiter Ecliptic-and lost my joy of life along with most of my family and freedom. I was shackled, yes.

Twenty-nine links of chain around my leg . . . On every link, an initial of my name.

Twenty-nine initials. I pondered that and realized that my name was legion. My initials were H. H., but there were many others like me, and their initials were on the chain, too. I liked the symbolism, painful as it was. Perhaps my father's initials were there, M. H., and my mother's, C. H., and my two sisters, F. H. and S. H., and my lost love, H. H., Helse Hubris, for I had married her, almost. I liked that idea.

I asked the judge what might be my fine. . . . Twenty-one years on the migrant-labor line!

That was, I learned later, adapted to the present situation; historically, back on Planet Earth, where all these songs had originated, it had been the Rocky Mountain Line. That was a mountain range in Earth's North America, said to be fairly formidable; presumably the line- which would then have been a locomotive or railroad line in which cumbersome steam-driven vehicles were propelled along metal rails laid on the ground-required hand labor for its initial establishment. I daresay it would have required a great deal of work to lay those rails properly in a mountain district, as the locomotives needed to operate on fairly level terrain. The technology of ancient times has always intrigued me. So the migrant laborers must have had back-straining work-as I would surely find out.

Anyway, I now had my song and my culture-nickname; I would have to answer to either Hope or Worry. They were much the same, really; opposite faces of the coin, depending on whether anticipation was positive or negative. I did like the song, and especially I liked the belongingness it made me experience. Singing together-there is something special about it. I believe every experience in life, of any nature, has some value to a person; this one had a great deal of value to me. Deprived of my family and my culture, I desperately needed new ones, and now it seemed I had them. Not as good as the old ones, but much, much better than drifting alone.

The songs continued as each man had his turn presenting his own, staking out his position in the group. But I was tired and hurting, as the exhilaration of my own song faded, and I lay on the bunk and listened and then slept. I suspected I was taking Joe's turn on the bunk, but he didn't say anything.

I woke with a start as the gravity abruptly cut off; acceleration was over. But Joe's hand was on me, holding me to the bunk, so I didn't float away. I had forgotten to strap myself down this time, since the acceleration had provided weight. Now he was putting the strap across. "Finish your nap," he advised me.

"But it's your bunk, too," I protested groggily.

"Not to worry, Worry," he said with a smile. "I can sleep floating while we're coasting."

"But when deceleration starts-"

"Kid, it's a fifteen-hour trip. I won't sleep that long. You're the one with the hurting head; relax."

I followed his advice. I had been in free-fall before and could handle it. In fact, I think the free-fall helped, for it relieved my body of the ordinary strain of gravity, allowing it to concentrate on healing. Free-fall does not help all people, but it helped me. When I woke again, several hours later, my head was virtually clear.

Joe was sleeping in air, one hand gripping a bunk rail. He looked perfectly comfortable.

Now the waking workers were swapping yarns and playing poker for pennies. I was satisfied just to listen, familiarizing myself with their qualities. These were generally uneducated folk, illiterate or partially literate, but canny enough in their limited fashion. Literacy does not equate to intelligence or humanity, after all. I was not familiar with their game of poker, but figured I could learn it in due course.

Meanwhile, as a mental exercise, I calculated, in the unfamiliar Jupiter units of miles, the location of the agricultural bubble we were traveling to. I had been raised on the superior metric system, but I knew I would have to become conversant with the system of the Colossus if I wanted to convert my alien residency to proper citizenship. Also, my lost love Helse had used the Jupiter system of measurements, so I felt closer to her with them, foolish as this may seem.

Acceleration measured in this fashion came to 32 feet per second squared, for one gee. 3,600 seconds in an hour meant-this was pretty good mental exercise, because of the irregular intervals between units-about 115,000 feet per second in an hour of gee, which seemed to be what we had experienced. There were-I strained to remember -5,280 feet in a mile. That meant we were traveling about 22 miles per second now, or close to 80,000 miles per hour. Fifteen hours at that velocity would be about 1,200,000 miles. But we would not be traveling straight in toward Jupiter; we would angle back to intercept the bubble as it overhauled Leda in its smaller, faster orbit. The bubble was probably about ten million kilometers out from Jupiter, compared to Leda's eleven million-oops, I had slipped back into the metric system!

At any rate, I was satisfied that the bubble was about 90 percent of Leda's distance out, in this miniature Solar System that was the Juclip, and that we would not be carried far from Leda in the ten days Joe said we would be picking. That reassured me; I didn't want to get lost and not be on hand to recover my identification.

We did indeed arrive on schedule, decelerating at gee for an hour and docking on the bubble. Our ship simply hooked onto a rack awaiting it and hung nose-out, suddenly upside down as the gee resumed. The bunks were made to take it; they could be used from either side. The bubble was rotating one complete turn every minute and a half, so that centrifugal force brought our weight at its surface to almost gee, Earth-normal gravity.