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

'It must have been -- Jesus, look at his face!'
She stepped forward and stared at the squat, heavy object half-buried in the soil. Her heart pounded. The child sensed her emotion and kicked against her distended belly. Go back, her husband told her. She lingered, on her haunches in the grass. Puyungarla moved toward the Strange Thing with brief, bird-like steps. The Firehawk was his Totem. How appropriate that he should claim a marvel fallen from the skies, dropped from the beak of a metal bird. Delicately, he touched its surface. She watched him study it, his young face hard and deliberate. He was beautiful and strong, and their child would be a son, surely, for the women had prophesied it, a son who would be a hunter and roam naked and free when the white men had done with killing one another, killing as beasts and true men never killed, killing unrestrained by the Law, killing until all their numbers were reduced in mutual slaughter to nothing. Puyungarla put his wiry black arms around the stout waist of the object and heaved. It teetered fractionally in its pit. A faint sound came from it, a click and an echo, like a tin can dropped on dry grass, and monstrous flame smashed gushed rolled thunder cried whirlwind plucked her husband into the air with his body shattered and pink blood hazing the icy shy metal shrieking and biting her like huge flies her arms wrapped in terror about her tearing belly and the child --
'Christ, did you see that? His whole body _spasmed_. He's torn the goddamn glucose drip out of his arm. I thought you said this guy was terminal comatose?'
'Shit. He's ripped the vein. I think the endotracheal emplacement is still okay. Get me a -- No, we can't use any sedation, his heart wouldn't take it. Hold his legs. If this doesn't finish him, we might have a live one.'
Alf fled from nightmare to nightmare. I'm sorry, the dragon told him. We should have kept that mnemonic pathway closed and guarded. Fortunately you won't remember it. Relax, son, you're very ill. We need you healthy and sane for what is to come.
That was my father, Alf cried. Horror and grief filled his soul. The connection between mind and body had been temporarily severed, or he would have wept.
Yes, said the dragon named Puyungarla. And your mother. And you, Alf Djanyagirnji. And you.
It was too much to cope with. Alf cringed away from the phantom and drew knees to chin, clutching forearms tight against chest. In the same instant, with trepidation, he knew that his paralysed body had failed to move a single voluntary muscle. Convulsively, he drove his legs down again, thrusting against bonds he could not see, and something truly terrible occurred. Like a straining limb withdrawn from a sucking, adhesive mass of contracting plaster, Alf pulled away from his own labouring flesh. He rose above his body, rolling slightly, and floated toward the low ceiling. All his senses were blurred. Vision held no focus, edges shimmered with the spectrum of light swirling on oil slick. Several men -- two, three? -- bent over his comatose torso, fiddling with tubes that branched, multiplied, coalesced.
The register of his emotions was curiously muted. A faint, azure sphere of light, he hung over his body and struggled for clarity. Voices echoed and clattered. He was no longer cold. And still, at some level of identity beyond both matter and mind, he danced timelessly the Dreaming, the totems, swept by streamers of auroral light and the warm welcoming song of the dragons all around him.
'Fuck it, he's arrested,' one of the voices said.
'What?'
'His heart has stopped, General. Get me a -- Oh, Christ! Orderly!'
Another shadowy figure burst into the room.
'Ten cc epinephrine, 1:1000, in a cardiac syringe. Stat, man. Christ, this is barbaric. General, if I save this man I'm moving him straight upstairs if I have to haul him there on my back. God damn your security clearances.'
With extraordinary detachment, Alf hovered above his dying body and watched the needle push into his dark breast. Blood rose into the barrel of the syringe. Remotely, he found the sight distasteful. He turned away, moved through the wall and discovered that he was staring down at Mouse.
Shame made him cringe: the first strong emotion he had experienced since leaving his body. Oh, Mouse, he thought. What are you doing here? I told you to stay put.
The boy raised his head and seemed to look directly at Alf, at the softly radiant sphere which Alf had become. A hard blue shell of light shone around the child's skull. Mouse smiled, his perfect teeth dazzling like an advertisement for municipal fluoride. Hello, Alf, he said. I think you'd better go back now. Don't worry, we'll be okay. Hey, one thing: get them to bring delFord here.
Alf said: Who?
They'll know, Mouse told him.
Absolved, dizzy with astonishment, Alf allowed himself to drift back through the wall. His body was breathing by itself, and greasy perspiration covered its face. There was a stubble of beard on its dark cheeks and neck. A tube protruded from its crusted mouth, held in place by a semi-rigid plug. That lump is not me, Alf thought with revulsion. It drew him, though, summoned him, denied him the pleasure of weightless drifting. He fell like a leaf toward the draped body on the bed. His mind-to-mind conversation with Mouse receded into deep unconsciousness.
In darkness, he was jostled. Now the voices seemed too distant for interpretation. The immense mass of the earth pressed him. A whine, a clatter, jolting, endless journey from hell to --
-- a moment of consciousness: pounding rain, a sky roiling with heavy charcoal cloud, feet running, a cold sheet of streaked plastic lifted past his face and held above him to ward off the rain by two swearing orderlies while a third tugged his trolley, the chill suddenly elevating the hairs on his skin, pain in his throat, chest, piercing shocking hurt in the depths of his brain --
He came half-awake with a spotlight glaring on his face. Several voices were engaged in laconic, droning dialogue. A high-pitched electronic beeping punctuated their words; it yelped to the beat of his heart. As his eyes opened a fraction, another voice called out excitedly. Alf let his lids close. Red haze, a cavorting strip of after-image. He could not understand what the men were saying. Straining for meaning, he realised that they spoke in a language unfamiliar to him. It sounded like ... what? Stage Russian? No, by God, it sounded like the authentic article. Which was absolutely ridiculous, in the middle of an Australian desert, just him and Mouse and the scrubby spinifex ... Alf giggled vaguely, and his teeth grated on something jammed into his mouth. It was too much effort. He relapsed into unconsciousness.
When he woke again he panicked. A clinical odour filled his nostrils. Male voices were talking, talking. Keeping his eyes closed, Alf told himself: There's been an accident. I'm in hospital. Prickling at fingers and toes. He could not recall the accident. With increasing alarm, he found that he could not remember anything at all since ... yes, there had been an incident, a stone had been thrown up by The Beast's front wheel and gone straight through the radiator. He'd had to stand out in the roasting sun for fifteen minutes trying to heal the damned thing and finally broke an egg into the boiling water. Good old bush expedient, floats to the hole and cooks, sealing it like regrown skin. Yet a mishap like that could scarcely put you into hospital. There seemed to be spiders perched all over his scalp. Wires. Hell, he was in an intensive care ward, wired for EEG.
One of the voices said: 'Theta's dropping out. I'm getting stronger beta. He's coming round.'
'Right. Page Security.'
Somebody had kicked him in the throat. He swallowed and it hurt. In a dry, croaking voice, Alf said: '_Cooma el ngruwar, ngruwar el cooma, illa booka mer ley urrie_.'
'He's awake.' A man in white was craning past a pole topped by a bottle of pale liquid. 'What did you say?' With a practised movement, the man pulled up Alf's right eyelid and speared a penlight beam into the centre of his brain. Alf blinked and jerked back his head. 'Good, full pupillary contraction. Let's just try the other one.'
'Throat.' The anthropologist tried to lift his arm, to massage the afflicted region. An IV tube snagged on its support.
'Yeah, it'll rasp for a while. We've been breathing for you. What language were you speaking just now?'
Another voice laughed raucously. 'Physician, heal thy self-image. I never knew you hankered to be an intelligence agent, Irwin.'
'Aboriginal rite,' Alf told the first man. 'Traditional saying.' After they'd kicked him in the throat, they had obviously pulled a bike chain through his gullet. He forced himself to finish his answer. 'It means, "One is all, all is one, the soul will not die."'
'Wow,' said the second voice, still scornful. 'Reincarnation of the Three Musketeers.' A door banged, and a number of additional men came into the room, crowding around the bed.
'Shut your mouth, Casey,' one of them said. 'You were given strict instructions not to talk to the patient. Has he said anything, Joinville?'
'Very little, sir.' The first medical man repeated Alf's translation word for word. 'He won't be able to handle too much stress right now, he's just woken up. And his larynx will still be sore from the endotrach.'
'I'll bear that in mind, Doctor,' the sharp baritone said. 'Okay buddy, let's hear your tale. We'll start at the start. How did you and the kid get into the Vault zone without being observed?'
Appalled, Alf pushed himself up from the sweaty sheets. 'Mouse?' he cried. 'Oh Jesus, I saw Mouse in there. Is he -- ?' Confused, then, he sagged back. 'No. No. Nightmare. Mouse stayed in the cavern.' Again his muscles spasmed. 'God Almighty, how long have I been here? You've got to get Mouse out of that place.' He began to cry. 'The poor little bastard...'
'Easy, Mr Dean.' A note of concern softened the baritone. 'That is your name? Alfred Dean? And the child's name is...?'
'Mouse,' Alf said, choking on the taste of warm salt. His emotions were out of control. Nothing made any sense. 'Hieronymus, actually. His mother had no brains. It must be hereditary.' He shook his head. 'You found him? He's not hurt?'
'We have him right here with us, just down the hall,' the man said soothingly. He wore a military uniform, punctiliously pressed, with a sky-blue UN Peacekeepers' cap. His eyes were a surprisingly soft green, and his cheeks were pitted very faintly with the acne scars of adolescence. Far from being a sinister touch, the dusting of scars was rather disarming. 'Mouse is fine. All we want to know, Mr Dean, is how you both got down there.'
With labile irritation, Alf said: 'Doctor.'
'I'm not a doctor, I'm a United States Army intelligence officer. Surely you grasp by now that -- '
Disregarding the I.V. channel, Alf heaved himself to a sitting position. 'I don't give a pig's fart in hell about your credentials, sport. _I'm_ a doctor.' He tried to get out of bed. 'Where's Mouse? I want to see him.'
Instantly, one of the medics was restraining him, pressing him back onto the bed. It was hardly an equal match. 'Dr Dean, control yourself. You've only been out of coma for two days. Your PVCs -- '
'Spare me the mumbo-jumbo, I'm not that brand of doctor.' Alf subsided. Mumbling, he said: 'Witchdoctor. I'm a PhD witchdoctor.' His overtaxed body started to close down the blood supply to his cortex, and he fell away into grey wool swarming with vitreous humours. They would not let him see his nephew. Were they his custodians or his jailers? He could not even estimate their provenance. Was he still in Australia? An insane question, but unavoidable. All the accents were foreign, and there was no consistency in them. Against all reason, some were American, and some were ... Russian? Eastern European, at any rate. His recovery room was makeshift modular, neat but meant to be stripped down and put up again in a hurry, after an overseas jaunt in a cargo plane. No windows. It had the look of a sick-bay designed to serve a modest community, undoubtedly of military service personnel. Three other beds were currently vacant but ready for use, made up with linen and blankets.
Under the artificial lights, Alf Dean put himself back together. When the lights went off he slept, and often enough he slept when they were on. In sleep he was bombarded by disturbing images that evaporated on touch. Somehow he was aware that his interval of coma had contained long stretches of just such bizarre and fearful dreams, but he could not recall their shape. One detail alone remained to plague him: an image of himself spread on a table, dying, tubes plugged into every orifice, while simultaneously he hung above that near-corpse, hung watching it, watching and talking to ... Whom? What? It was, of course, ludicrous even to wonder. Fantasies left over from drastic illness could hardly aid him in his present crisis.
'How did you get in there, Dr Dean?' they were asking him again, again, again.
'In _where?_' he yelled with frustration. 'I don't know where I am, you won't tell me who you are, what you represent. I've told you everything I can and none of it pleases you. For God's sake, what more can I say?' He shook with ire. 'And where the fuck is Mouse? I demand to see him!'
It did no good. The interrogations were restrained by a prudent alertness to his physical debility, but the men who questioned him told him nothing at all. The procedure was utterly ruthless. Only one fact was obvious: they believed nothing he said. Except perhaps his name. Assuming indeed that they had checked his identity with the Australian authorities, with his university, with his ex-wife for that matter, the corroboration of his statements had not persuaded them of his trustworthiness.
'Let's go over it again, Dr Dean. You were driving across the Tanami desert in a Land Rover, accompanied only by your nephew.'