"Chalker, Jack L - Four Lords 4 - Medusa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

"There's no way to know. Morah came out and told me that I'd not carried my deductions to their logical conclusions." He sighed and drummed his fingers against a desk top. "It must have to do with the nature of the aliens. He called them incomprehensible, basically, yet he said he understood what they were doing. That means it is a question not of deed but motivation." The fist slammed down hard on the desk. "But we know their motivation, dammit! It has to be!" Again he struggled to get hold of himself.

"We are still handicapped in one way," the computer noted. "We have not yet met the aliens, not yet seen them. We still know nothing about them other than the inference that they breathe an atmosphere similar to human norm, and are comfortable within normal temperature ranges."

He nodded. "That's the problem. And that I'm not likely to get from Medusa, either, unless there's some miracle. A psychotic killer who sees them thinks of them as evil. A psychotic Lord thinks of them as funny-looking but hardly evil, just self-interested. And intellects like Kreegan and Morah see them as a positive force. And that's all we really know, isn't it? After all this ..."

"No race lasts long enough to reach the stars and do all that this one has done unless it first acts in its own self-interest," the computer noted. "We can probably dismiss the evil concept of the criminal on one of dozens of bases, the most probable being that these aliens are subjectively terrifying to look at, or smell putrid, or something of that sort. It is hardly likely that their evolution, even given some of the same basics as humankind, is anything like that of humans."

He nodded. "I keep thinking of Morah's inhuman eyes. He claims he is not a robot and that he is the same Yatek Morah sentenced to the Diamond more than forty years ago. We need not believe him, and should not, but let's for a moment take his statements at face value. If he is who and what he claims to be -- then why those eyes?"

"A Warden modification, possibly self-induced for effect. He could do it easily on Charon."

"Perhaps. But, perhaps, too, those eyes mean something more. What does he see with them? And how? A broader spectrum, perhaps? I don't think they are totally for effect. For protection, maybe? I wonder ..."

"Still, the bottom line remains your report," the computer noted. "I will admit that I, too, am somewhat curious, even though I have the basics."

"Medusa first. Let's complete the set. Maybe my missing piece will be found there. Or, maybe, what I experience will jog my mind to see those missing implications. It can't hurt."

"But Talant Ypsir lives. The mission is incomplete there."

"We are beyond caring about the Lords of the Diamond now, I think, except, perhaps, in some sort of solution if one is possible. I need information. Medusa will have the most direct contacts with the aliens. Let me get the information I need."

"But whether or not it is there, you will still make your report after that?"

He nodded. "Ill make my report." He got up and walked forward to the central console, then sat down in the large padded chair and adjusted it for maximum comfort. "Are you ready?"

"Yes." The computer lowered the probes, which the agent carefully attached to his forehead. Now he simply lay back and relaxed, hardly feeling the computer-induced injection that cleared his mind and established the proper state for receipt and filtration of this kind of information.

Thanks to an organic module inside the brain of his other self down there on Medusa, every single thing that had happened to that other self was transmitted to the computer as raw data. Now it would be fed into the mind of the original in the chair, filtered -- the basics and unimportant matter discarded by his own mind -- and that other self would give a basic report both to the agent in the chair and to the computer as if the man were there in that room -- which, in a very broad and very odd sense, he was.

The drugs and small neural probes did their job. His own mind and personality receded, replaced by a similar, yet oddly different pattern.

"The agent is commanded to report," the computer ordered, sending the command deep into the agent's mind, a mind no longer quite his own.

Recorders clicked on.

Slowly, the man in the chair cleared his throat. He mumbled, groaned, and made odd, disjointed words and sounds, as his mind received, coded, and classified the incoming data, adjusted it all, and sorted it out.

Finally, the man began to speak.





CHAPTER ONE

Rebirth