"Delany, Samuel R - The Einstein Intersection 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

Morning had got far enough along to rouge the sky behind him. He flicked a final encumbering flower from the beast, "Sssssss . . . blop!" and coiled his whip. I rubbed my calf. The dragon moaned, off key.
"Yours?" I thumbed over my shoulder at the beast.
"Was." He breathed deeply and the flat, bony chest sagged with his breathing, the ribs opening and closing like blinds. "If you come with us, he's yours-to ride, anyway. If you don't, he's mine again."
The dragon rubbed his gills ingenuously against my hip.
"Can you handle a dragon whip?" the stranger asked me.
I shrugged. "The only time I ever even saw one of these before was when some herders got off their trail six years ago." We'd all climbed up Beryl-Face and watched them drive the herd of lizards back through Green-glass Pass. When Lo Hawk went to talk to them, I went with him, which is where I found out about branding and the gentle monsters.
The stranger grinned. "Well, its gone and happened again. I judge we're about twenty-five kilometers off. You want a job and a lizard to ride?"
I looked at the broken flowers. "Yeah."

"Well, there's your mount, and your job is to get him up here and back with the herd, first."
"Oh." (Now, lemme see; I remember the herders perched behind the lumps of the beasts' shoulders with their feet sort of tucked into the scaly armpits. My feet? And holding on to the two white whisker type things that grew back from the gills: Gee ... Haw? Giddiap!)
We floundered in the mud about fifteen minutes with instructions shouted down, and I learned cuss words I hadn't ever heard from that guy. Towards the end we were both sort of laughing. The dragon was up and on the beach now, and he had quite unintentionally thrown me into the water-again.
"Hey, you think I'm going to really learn how to ride that thing?"
With one hand he was helping me up, with the other he was holding my mount by the whiskers, with another he was recoiling his whip, and with the fourth he just scratched his woolly head. "Don't give up. I didn't do too much better when I started. Up you go."
Up I went, and stayed on this time for a staggering run up and down the water's edge. I mean it looks graceful enough from the ground. It feels like staggering. On stilts.
"You're getting the hang of it."
"Thanks," I said. "Say, where is the herd; and who are you!"
He stood ankle deep in the lake's lapping. Morning was bright enough now to gem his chest and shoulders with drops from my splashing. He smiled and wiped his face. "Spider," he said. "And I didn't catch your name ...?"
"Lo Lobey." I rocked happily behind the scaly hump.

"Don't say Lo to nobody herding," said Spider. "No need for it."
"Wouldn't even have thought of it if it weren't for my village ways," I said.
"Herd's off that way." He swung up behind me on the dragon.
Amber haired, four handed, and slightly hump-backed, Spider was seven feet of bone slipped into six feet of skin. Tightly. All tied in with long, narrow muscles. He was burned red, and the red burned brown but still glowing through. And he laughed like dry leaves crushed inside his chest. We circled the lake silently. And, oh man, the music!
The herd, maybe two hundred and fifty dragons moaning about (I was to learn that this was a happy sound), milled in a dell beyond the lake. Youth had romanticized the herders in my memory. They were motley. I see why you don't go around Lo-ing and La-ing and Le-ing herders. Two of them-I still don't see how they managed to stay on their dragons. But I came on friendly.
One kid with a real mind: you could tell by the way his green eye glittered at you, as well as his whip skill, and the sure way he handled dragons. Only he was mute. Was it this that upset me and made me think of Friza? You have a job to do....
There was another guy who would have made Whitey look like a total norm. He had some glandular business that made him smell bad too. And he wanted to tell me his life story (no motor control of the mouth so he sort of splattered when he got excited).
I wish Green-eye could have talked instead of Stinky.

I wanted to learn where he'd been, what he'd seen-he knew some good songs.
Dragons get lost at night. So you round them up in the morning. I'd been rounded up along with the stray animals. At breakfast I gathered from Stinky that I was a replacement for somebody who had come to a bad, sad, and messy end the previous afternoon.
"Oddest people survive out here," Spider mused. "Oddest ones don't. She looked a lot more 'normal' than you. But she ain't here now. Just goes to show you."
Green-eye blinked at me from under all his black hair, caught me watching him, and went back to splicing his whip.
"When are those dragon eggs gonna finish baking?" Knife asked, pawing at the fireplace stones with gray hands.
Spider kicked at him and the herder scuttled away. "Wait till we all eat." But in a few minutes he crawled back and was rubbing against the stones. "Warm," he muttered apologetically, when Spider started to kick him again, "I like it warm."
"Just keep off the food."
"Where do you take these to?" I indicated the herd. "Where do you bring them from?"
"They breed in the Hot Swamp, about two hundred kilometers west of here. We drive them down this way, across the Great City and on to Branning-at-sea. There the sterile ones are slaughtered; the eggs are removed from the females, inseminated, then we bring the eggs back and plant them in the swamp."
"Branning-at-sea?" I asked. "What do they do with them there?"
"Eat most. Use others for work. It's quite a fantastic

place for someone born in the woods, I would imagine. I've been back and forth so many times it's like home. I've got a house and a wife and three kids there, and another family back in the Swamp."
We ate eggs, fried lizard fat, and thick cereal, hot and filling, with plenty of salt and chopped peppers. When I finished I began to play my blade.
That music!
It was a whole lot of tunes at once, many the same, but starting at different times. I had to pick one strand out and play it. A few notes into it, I saw Spider staring at me, surprised. "Where did you hear that?" he asked.
"Just made it up, I guess."
"Don't be silly."
"It was just running around my head. All confused, though."
"Play it again."
I did. This time Spider began to whistle one of the other melodies that went along with it so that they glittered and jumped against each other.