"Brackett, Leigh - Skaith 1 - Ginger Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brackett Leigh)
ADVENTURE AT ITS BEST
Stark grasped his own ankle, found the odd hand that did not belong there, and shifted his grip to the alien wrist. And all the time he and the sea-thing were plunging deeper, the milky light growing dimmer.
The arm was long and furred, and powerful muscles were imbedded in a layer of fat. Stark's grip kept slipping, and he knew that if he lost it he was finished. His fingers clawed and tore, moving convulsively toward the point of leverage.
The smooth descent stopped. The creature turned its head and Stark saw the blurred face, eyes filmed and staring, bubbles trickling from a vestigial nose. The free arm that had been oaring them downward now swung over, not toward his hands but toward the back of his neck. The game was over . ..
"Imaginatively, Brackett is absolutely at the top of her genre, filling this book as full of marvels, personalities, strange customs, and hair-raising escapes as a Christmas pudding is full of plums. Of its kind, it's just delicious."
ЧPublishers Weekly
BOOKS BY LEIGH BRACKET! Published by Baliantine Books
THE BEST OF LEIGH BRACKETT
THE BOOK OF SKAITH
Volume One: THE GINGER STAR Volume Two: THE HOUNDS OF SKAITH Volume Three: THE REAVERS OF SKAITH
THE LONG TOMORROW THE STARMEN OF LLYRDIS
THE
GINGER STAR
Volume One of The Book of Skaith
A Del Rey Book BALLANTINE BOOKS Х NEW YORK
A somewhat shorter version of this novel was serialized in the magazine Worlds of IF, Copyright й 1974 by UPD Publishing Corporation.
A Del Key Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright й 1974 by Leigh Brackett Hamilton
ISBN 0-345-28514-X
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition: May 1974 Third Printing: December 1979
First Canadian Printing: May 1974 Map by Bob Porter Cover art by Boris Vallejo
For Robert and Cecelia
1
Stark got his final view of Pax from the tender, going out to the spaceport moon, and that was the best view he had had of it. Pax is the chief habitable planet of Vega. It is also a city, and the proud boast of that hopefully and precariously christened world is that not one single grain of corn grows upon it, nor is one single useful item manufactured.
The city soars up into the sky. It spreads out over every landmass and swallows up small seas. It burrows underground, level upon level. Large areas of it are especially conditioned and equipped for non-humans. Everything comes into it from the outside. All supplies are shipped to the lunar docks and brought on down by freight tenders. Nothing lives on Pax but bureaucrats, diplomats, and computers.
Pax is the administrative center of the Galactic Union, a democratic federation of star-worlds flung across half the Milky Way and including, very incidentally, the worlds of little Sol. In this place the millions of problems besetting billions of people inhabiting thousands of diverse planets are reduced to tidy and easily manageable abstractions on tapes, cards, and endless sheets of paper.
A paper world, Stark thought, full of paper people.
Simon Ashton was not made of paper. Time, and accomplishments in planetary administration, had promoted him to a comfortable office at the Ministry of Planetary Affairs and a comfortable apartment in a mile-high building which he need not ever leave, if he did not wish to, except to take one of the moving walkways to work. Still, like many of his colleagues in that Ministry, Ashton had never lost his rawhide, taut-wire energy. He often went into the field, knowing that the problems of actual beings in actual places could not be solved merely by the regurgitation of data from a bank of clacking machines.
He had gone once too often into the field. He had not come back.
Stark received that information on one of the un-licked worlds outside the Union, where life was a little more relaxed for people like himself. He was, as the old phrase had it, a wolf's-headЧa totally masterless man in a society where everyone respectable belonged to something. He bestowed his allegiance only where he chose, usually for pay. He was a mercenary by trade, and there were enough little wars going on both in and out of the Union, enough remote peoples calling on him for the use of his talents, so that he was able to make a reasonable living doing what he did best
Fighting.
He had begun fighting almost before he could stand. Bora in a mining colony in Mercury's Twilight Belt, he had fought to live on a planet that did not encourage life; his parents were dead, his foster-parents a tribe of sub-human aboriginals clawing a precarious existence out of the sun-stricken valleys. He had fought, without success, the men who slaughtered those foster-parents and put him in a cage, a snarling curiosity. Later on, he had fought for a different kind of survival, the survival of himself as a man.
He would never have got past square one without Simon Ashton.
He could remember vividly the heat, the raw pain of loss, the confinement of the bars, the men who laughed and tormented him. Then Ashton came, Ashton the wielder of authority, the savior, and that was the beginning of the life of Eric John Stark, as distinguished from N'Chaka, the Man-Without-a-Tribe.
Now twice-orphaned, Eric/N'Chaka gradually accepted Ashton as his father-in-being. More than that, he accepted Ashton as his friend. The years of his growing-up were associated almost solely with Ashton because they had been much alone in the frontier stations to which Ashton was sent. Ashton's kindness, his counsel, his patience, his strength and his affection were stamped indelibly on the fibers of Stark's being. He had gotten even his name through Ashton, who had searched the records of Mercury Metals and Mining to track down his parents.
And now Simon Ashton was missing, disappeared, on the world of a ginger star somewhere at the back of beyond, out in the Orion Spur. A newly discovered, newly opened world called Skaith that hardly anyone had ever heard of, except at Galactic Center. Skaith was not a member of the Union but there had been a consulate. Someone had called to the Union for help, and Ashton was the man who went to see about it.
Ashton had, perhaps, exceeded his authority. Even so, his superiors had done their best. But the local powers closed the consulate and refused entrance to officers of the Union. All attempts to discover Ashton's whereabouts, or the reason for his disappearance, had ended at a blank wall.
Stark caught the first available ship outbound for Galactic center and Pax. Looking for Ashton had become his personal business.
The weeks he had spent at Pax had been neither pleasant nor easy. He had had to do a great deal of talking and convincing and, after that, much learning. He was glad to be leaving, impatient to get on with the job.
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