"Broderick, Damien - The Dreaming (The Dreaming Dragons)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Broderick Damien)

'No.' From the second bottle he'd had uncapped at the table Alf was pouring his third hefty beer, carefully monitoring the foamy head's dimensions and density.
'Married?'
'It broke up two years ago.'
Bill waited. 'Bad, huh?'
'I sent her packing. She had a big mouth.' The anthropologist glanced grimly at Hugh, but the astronaut maintained a guileless expression. Rotten puns under control, Bill noted with approval. 'Karen was always fronting people she hardly knew and asking for their life histories.'
In a perfectly natural movement, Hugh Lapp was out of his seat and leaning relaxed on the table. 'Got to run, gang. I'll check on Mouse and tell them to expect you shortly. No, no, finish the bottle. You won't get lost, Bill, Alf knows the way.'
The engineers had departed, and a group of Russians were seating themselves, shouting for the menu. Not Army men. It's a habit they contract, Bill remembered. If they don't bellow at home it takes all day. 'I'm not prying, Alf. Mouse is my primary concern. I need to know everything I can get about his background and I gather his background is mostly you.'
'Yeah.' Dean brought one hand down over his face. 'Sorry. Ask away. Medical stuff?'
'I can get that from the files. To be blunt, I'm wondering how a blonde European adolescent has an Aboriginal uncle. Mouse is your sister's boy right?'
'Eleanor is my step-sister. I was adopted by Iain Dean several months after I was born.'
'Ah. The genetics of it did seem rather improbable. Are such adoptions customary?'
'Far from it.' Dean snarled. 'The rule in this racist shitheap has been to segregate the tribal blacks from the part-aboriginals wherever possible, and to keep both groups out of sight in case our repulsive presence frightens the women and children. Under the Act, blacks were detained by the authorities on reserves and compounds "for their own good". Vested interests, of course. We had no economic value, so they tried to exterminate us. There were no cotton plantations here, Doctor. At least the African slaves in America were housed and fed at a level comparable with other livestock. We weren't allowed to vote, of course, though they shovelled the gentle Jesus meek and mild crap down our throats. I was an adult before a referendum got us included in the national Census.'
The beer was abreacting Dean's hostility into loquaciousness. 'Fully grown men and women were wards of the State. They needed permission to marry. I know this isn't answering your question, Bill, but it's the background. Half-castes -- "yellow-fellers" -- sometimes got raised in a white household, out of conscience or kindness. A lot of them were abducted from their mothers and sent south to orphanages, and sometimes whites adopted them. After all, they had halfway human genes. There was a trace of hope for them. But not for my kind.'
Bill watched the dark face, its passion, its force. 'You're a full-blood, I take it.'
'Special case. Iain Dean was a young Army doctor with stars in his eyes. He was posted to Darwin during the war. His wife thought I was the cutest thing she'd ever seen. They'd had to cut me out of my mother's belly.'
The double jump took Bill by surprise. Let the man tell it his own way, he decided.
After a lengthy pause, Alf Dean went on: 'I went back later, you see. I wanted to know why my parents had given me away. They hadn't, the poor buggers. A Japanese bomb had blown my father to pieces and left my mother so revoltingly injured that she died three days later. A fucking Jap bomb, in someone else's war. They're all white to us, delFord. Puyungarla, his name was. Ngularrnga tribe. Most of them are gone now, just a few dirty old men and women hanging around the periphery of town eating scraps and drinking themselves blind.' His voice faded. 'Wanntakgara. She was beautiful. A beautiful black wife.'
Dean's hand lost its loose grip on his beaded glass. The dishes had been taken from the table. Bill ordered coffee for them both.
'Do you regret your adoption?'
'Ungrateful, aren't I? Here I am, the best educated boong in the whole country. The rest of them are lucky if they make it through high school. While whingeing stolen-generation Alf Dean teaches anthropology from the fine paper podium of a PhD.'
Boong. A hideous word. Bill had heard it used several times since he'd arrived. A black human is not a human, but a boong. His heart went out to Dean. Compared with this man's horrific background, for all its superficial felicity and good fortune, his own battle up from the docks of Liverpool had been conducted by gentlemen's rules.
He prompted Alf. 'The Deans had a child of their own sometime later?'
'Yeah. Resurgent fertility. Eleanor came late, change-of-life kid. And of course she resented me. Backlash. It was wonderfully baroque when she was little, having a black brother. By the time she was adolescent I was competition. She needed to go further out by her own efforts than I'd managed just by being born. So she finally hit the dope trail and never came back. Mouse was an occupational hazard.'
Mouse could wait. Bill diverted him back to his own history. 'You went looking for your natural parents, and stayed to be initiated? I noticed the cicatrized marks on your chest.'
'The Deans wouldn't tell me. But the Ngularrnga knew who I was. They told me what skin I belonged to, my totems, gave me a list of my potential brides. Pity about that, there were only two of them, both over forty. One had syphilis. I think they were relieved when I told them I was already married. But I stayed for six months. Ate dog food out of tins and drank muscat out of plastic flagons. They put me through initiation. I'd been circumcised in maternity hospital, so they covered me instead with these pretty decorations. You're looking at a Man of Silence, Bill. Alf Djanyagirnji. I can't hunt worth a damn but I've danced the Lorrkun and Yabudurawa corroborees.' He looked away. 'They hate the dead, you know. Sing them off in the Lorrkun, beg them not to come back from 'Nother Place. _Cooma el ngruwar_...'
Carefully, Bill said, 'But you didn't join them. A black American in your situation might have become, oh, a Panther spokesman, a civil rights leader...'
Alf acted as if he hadn't heard. 'Christ, they brew a good pot of coffee here, I'll give them that. I can't hold my grog any more. That fucking thing down there has knocked the shit out of my metabolism.'
'Give me your wrist. Hmm, a bit sluggish. Your pupils are contracted rather more than they ought to be. I advise you to get some rest.'
'Hang on, I'm all right. Anyway, I can't leave you to wander off through this place without a guide. It's a bloody maze.'
His dereliction with Mouse? 'Hugh'll roust me out. Come on, feller, I'll see you to your room.'
'I haven't finished the Dean family saga. I'll spare you the heat-death of my marriage. Mostly I was off in remote places doing field work, and my nice white wife Karen didn't want a baby. She considered absentee fatherhood an inappropriate way to raise a kid. Then my imbecile sister Ellie got herself pregnant and burned out the baby's brain with massive doses of acid. Since then, she's spent more time in the looney bin than out of it. My mother looked after Mouse for the first couple of years but he got too much for her, and we started taking him at our place two or three days a week. When I got my lectureship I heard of a special program the Neuropsychiatric Department was starting for brain-damaged kids. We brought Mouse down to stay with us, and of course Karen copped most of the responsibility.'
A tremor went through Alf's body. 'I never understood how much she resented it. She certainly didn't take her anger out on the boy. Well, finally she shot through, and I got stuck with Mouse. Fuck.' He jerked his eyes up and shook his head wildly. 'That's not what I meant. I love that kid, I really do. And now he's stuck in a glass cage with wires in his head. Jesus.'
'Right,' Bill said briskly. 'Point me toward your room. You need sleep more than I need information.' Hoisting Alf to his feet, and waving away offers of help, he steered the ill man out under the struts of the main corridor which circled the dome's perimeter. 'What's your room number?'
'North quadrant, 47. I'm bunking with Mouse. Around to your right, there's a bilingual sign.'
A crewcut Pfc paused, appraising them. Bill told him: 'Private, get a medic to meet us in Dr Dean's quarters. And if you can find him, I'd like Captain Lapp to join us there.'
'Yes, sir. Do you need any help?'
'I can manage.'
The side corridors were numbered with unusual rationality. Breathing hard, Bill opened the door marked N-47 and eased Alf onto the closest bed. A lieutenant with medic's flashes appeared almost immediately, with Hugh on his heels.
'Sorry, Bill, I should have alerted you. It clobbers him from time to time. I'm told there's no obvious organic cause for it. My hunch is, he's in resonance with Mouse. Keep us informed, Lieutenant, we'll be at the Cage.'
They walked quickly through the maze. Rain drummed dismally, grey noise from the high dome. In a low tone, over the clash of their boots on concrete Hugh said: 'The kid's scribbling like Dumas _pere_ on a writing jag. It'll knock you out.' He fished in a breast pocket. 'Better wear this or we'll hear every klaxon in the building.' A large heat-sealed identity card bore Bill's photograph, thumbprints, and security rating. He pinned it on.
'We run Mouse in a shielded room,' Hugh told him. 'Don't ask me why, the physicists consider it a failsafe precaution.'
'Stuck in a glass cage with wires in his head,' Bill quoted.
'Not exactly. It's a triple-walled Faraday cage. Copper interleaved with polystyrene acoustic foam, and NASA telemetry access. You get 150 decibels of attenuation on radio frequencies from 15,000 cycles up to about a billion. Magnetic fields are cut by about 70 decibels at 15 kilohertz, though it drops off as you get down to 60 cycles. Hellishly expensive getting it here, and it doesn't faze the kid for a moment.'
'Try a gluon field.'
'Nah, too risky. He's an international resource.'
An armed guard inspected Bill's credentials with more than passing interest, and did the same with Hugh's.
'Didn't you just come out of here?'
'S.O.P., Bill. That kid might turn out to be the super-weapon of World War Three.'
'Oh, for crying out loud.'
They entered a dim room crammed with instruments, oscilloscopes gibbering blue and white pulses, little panel lamps flickering on and off like holiday ornaments. Two TV screens showed a teenage boy with a medusa scalp of delicate wiring. His face could not be seen but his posture was relaxed, almost torpid. The swift mechanical sweep of his right hand seemed something detached, tracking back and forth without cease across a flat, braced illuminated board. Beside him in a comfortable chair a bored attendant sat partially in view. A boom mike hung above Mouse's head; his regular breathing was just audible.