"C. J. Cherryh - Fever SeasonUC - Compilation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cherryh C J)

He saw them as Michael Chamoun had never seen them, clear and bright and oh so close. There were so many, and among them, the enemy sharrh. He could see those too, because he was staring close-up at a targeting array. He was lying on his stomach across a smoking control console as his blood shorted circuits beneath him.
He had a vocabulary, in this body, that knew the names and purposes of all these things. It knew the crosshairs and the changing numbers below and beside certain moving stars, stars that maneuvered as no star should be able to. He knew his name was Michael, here, tooЧbut everyone called him Mickey. He knew he was an electronics specialist in the Merovin Defense Force, and he knew that they were up against an enemy they weren't prepared to handle.
He knew the patrol ship around him was dying, and that everybody on itЧthe men he'd shipped with, the friends who made up his extended familyЧwas doomed. The sharrh weren't just a legend, then, one of his minds told the other.
The sharrh weren't just an anomalous sea story, the mind of Mickey corrected the mind of Michael. The sharrh were very real and very near and very sure to win.
There was nothing berthed on or near Merovin with the kind of firepower, let alone the numbers, to give the sharrh a run for their money. The mind of Mickey, fading, was full of sorrow for a job undone, and regret at not being able to protect what he so dearly lovedЧthe colony below. The mind of Michael tried to tell the mind of Mickey that it was all right, not to grieve, that there'd be life left when this was over.
The mind of Mickey mourned, But the sharrh will win. We can't fight them, not with these weapons.
The mind of Michael consoled, But life will go on; civilization will surviveЧplanetbound, but alive.
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The mind of Mickey didn't think there was any civilization worth mentioning without the stars. The mind of Mickey was a rover's mind, a soldier's mind, a mind that couldn't grasp what Michael was trying to tel! it.
So Michael lied to the mind of Mickey, saying that the Adventists would make mankind on Merovin ready for a second confrontation with the sharrhЧand that this time, man would win. Lied even as, through Mickey's eyes, he saw the targeting array shiver with sharrh ships like pox popping out on a sick child's faceЧtoo many sharrh ships for the damaged display to handle. It went Wank, and so did the mind of Mickey, wiping out the changing numbers and the unchanging stars.
Michael Chamoun heard a voice groaning, and another voice speaking unintelligible words. And he heard another sound, like the rushing of air from a vesselЧor from lungs. He heard the rending of metal and the rending of flesh. He heard a soul leave its body and other souls screaming their last breaths as a ship broke apart under them, leaving them abandoned in a sea they couldn't swim.
Then there was just quiet, and the pinprick stars on a field of red, and one voice droning over and over, "Michael, come back. You hear only my voice. You respond only to me. I will count to three, and at the count of three, you will open your eyes ..."
The voice had been saying that for ages, Michael realized, and tried not to listen. He wasn't Michael, he was Mickey, and Mickey was a dead sergeant in the Merovin Defense Force who wanted to sleep forever, who didn't want there to be an afterlife because he'd failed in life and helped lose everything dear to him: a war, a society, a freedom ... the stars.
The stars were what Michael Chamoun first saw when his eyes snapped open as if Ito Tremaine Boregy had strings attached to his eyelids. The stars danced in his field of vision, nearly blocking out the soft suede boots of his Merovingian outfit, the boots Cassie had given him.
Then he saw the boots and he could fee! his hands on his
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knees, his fingers digging remorselessly into his own flesh. He could feel his heart pounding, very much alive. He could hear the thunder of his pulse in his ears. And he could hear Cardinal Ito telling him he wouldn't remember any of this.
But he already did. He remembered everything. He looked up into the eyes of the parchment-faced Revenantist cardinal and said, "I was there. I was there in the first battle against the sharrh! 1 saw it! I was a part of it." Somehow, he got to his feet and his legs held.
He took two steps, hands outstretched, toward the cardinal. Then he faltered and suddenly his arms went around the old, sepulchral monster and Michael Chamoun was sobbing up-ashamedly: "Thank you, Cardinal. Oh thank you, m'ser! You've given me more hope than I've ever had beforeЧmore strength, more . . ."He broke off when he felt the old man stiffen.
They backed away from one another. Chamoun, trying to hold his fear and awe and the strange joy welling up in him, tried again: "I never really believed in reincarnation, m'ser, but you've made a convert out of me! I'm so grateful.-I've got toЧ"
"You will do nothing," said the cardinal in a thundering whisper. "You will tell no one of what you think you remember. You don't remember anything, m'ser. You had an aberrant vision, nothing more. You're a foreigner. The drug was too strong for you. We use it to mold the hearts and minds of the gullible, to teach humility and obedience. We don't use it to reinforce specious hopes of confrontation with an apocryphal enemy. We don't use it to reinforce Adventist rebels in their sinful work!" Ito's eyes were blazing, coal black in his lined white face. "Do you understand what I'm telling you, Adventist?"
"Uh . . . yes, m'ser. I'll keep what I learned to myself."
"You didn't learn anything, you fool." Ito strode around to the other side of his desk in a flourish of velvet. From behind it, with both fists resting on it, the cardinal said forcefully, "This ritual is forbidden to the masses; it's not to be discussed with anyone, not even Vega Boregy. On pain of
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Retribution of the persona! sortЧoverseen by me. What you thought you experienced had more to do with your expectations than reality. In your previous lives, Adventist slime, you were no doubt a stableboy, a petty thief, or a murderer. There was never any Merovin Defense Force, and if there had been, a soul as poor as yours could not have been among them. As likely you were the Angel with the SwordЧthe true Michael. Now get out of here, and come to your senses. Your lessons are suspended for one week as punishment. If, at the end of that week, 1 don't like your demeanor when you return here, they'll be suspended permanently. And we'll see how long your precious marriage lasts after a College cardinal has deemed you officially Irredeemable. Now, out!"
Chamoun let the tirade roll over him, only half listening. His head danced with the images he'd encountered during the regression: with the vision of the patrol ship's bridge; with his memories of the stars and the culture he'd been a part of, which called the stars its own.
It had to be real. It had tp be true. He'd never have dreamed such a thingЧnever had in atl his life. Ito was just angry because it was an Adventist past-life that Michael Chamoun had found himself living. A life that had ended abruptly, ended in darkness, but ended with honor.
Chamoun never remembered slipping out the door of the cardinal's office, or through the Coliege halls, or down the slatrs.
Then the cold wind came in off the canai and slapped him across the face, and he remembered the death of Mickey. Spinning toward the light. Nausea at the speed. But spinning toward the center of the universe, free among the stars. He didn't know where the Revenantist creed would take its adherents, but he'd learned something very precious: to him and his kind, eventually, were given the stars. HisЧor Mickey'sЧdying soui had sped toward a central point in the universe, past starfields and through comets' tails, as if drawn by a magnet. The Revenantists believed that if they lived righteously and died enough, they'd be reborn repeatedly, until they got it right. Then, having expiated all sins, they'd be
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reincarnated on some other human world, a world less blighted, a world that was not a prison.
But Michael Chamoun now knew, in the depths of his heart, that the prison doors would open with his death. He'd be like Mickey, free among the stars. Mickey had been relieved when, after the ship shook apart under him, the pain shook apart too. And there had been the traveling.
Unseeingly, Chamoun headed homeward, forgetting to take the long way, going around the Signeury on the inner side, where the bridge to the Justiciary was, thinking things through.
There was life after death, and there was rebirth, not just the racial memory or wishful thinking that Ito had told bim he'd experienced. Mickey was a part of him, or Michael could never have imagined the smell of burning insulation on melting wires, of overstressed circuitry, and the sound as the air rushed from the screaming, rent hull of the ship. . . .
Mickey was a part of Michael, who was a part of the Adventists, who remembered their responsibility to the people of Merovin, who knew what Merovin needed to do before it was too late ... -
Thump! "Hrrmph!"
"M'sera Kalugin! I'm so sorry. I didn't see you. Lost in my thoughts. . . ." Desperately, Chamoun clamped his mouth shut. He'd walked straight into Tatiana Kalugin, and she wasn't alone. With her was Chance Magruder, and the Ambassador was frowning at him.
"M'sera Secretary, I believe you met our newest Boregy, Michael Chamoun, al the Twenty-Fourth EveЧ"
"Your protege, you mean, Chance," said the tall Kalugin woman with the canny eyes. "Yes. 1 recall him. Good evening, m'ser Chamoun. What had you so absorbed in your thoughts?"
"What am 1 doing here, you mean?" Chamoun spoke without thinking. "I was at my catechism lesson. Cardinal Ito is teaching me, and he . . ." Ito had warned him not to tell.
Chamoun looked desperately at Magruder and the dangerous tableau before him came into sharper focus, wiping away the memories of Mickey and the warm, exultant feeling that
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had buoyed him ever since he'd awakened from the trance. He made a motion with his right hand, a conference signal Magruder had taught him; then another that meant, 'I need help.'
But Magruder didn't appear to notice. He stood in the whipping wind with a Merovingen cloak billowing around him so that he seemed twice mortal size. The dusk put shadows under his eyes and deepened the bars of flesh around his tight mouth. His colorless eyes measured Chamoun for a long moment as a gust whipped up and past.
Tatiana grabbed her hair at the nape of her neck to keep it from blowing in her face and looked from Chamoun to Magruder, understanding that something was wrong hereЧor at least that something was keeping Magruder rooted to the spot.
Then Chance said, "Have you heard, Mike, that losers decreed a census? Tatiana and I have been trying to wrestle with the logistics of it all day."
"1Чyes, I've just heard."