"Terry Dowling - The Lagan Fishers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dowling Terry)

Terry Dowling
THE LAGAN FISHERS

In the first week of September, a lagan bloom appeared in the south meadow below Sam Cadrey's kitchen
window, and that was the day it felt real at last.
Something glinting in the morning sunlight caught his eye as he stood making coffee-dislodged hubcap,
plastic drum lid, discarded garbage bag, he couldn't be sure-something close to the road but definitely on his
property. When he hurried down to see what it was, there was no mistaking the glossy quatrefoil of tartarine
pushing up through the lucerne like an old bore cover made of fused glass. He kicked at the shell of
opalescent stuff, beat on it a few times, then stood wondering how much his life would change.
Sam knew his rights. They couldn't take his farm back, he was sure of that. When that small container of
mioflarin-MF-illegally buried in the Pyrenees had leaked in 2029, poisoning so much of Europe, then the rest
of the world, he'd become that rare and wondrous thing, a true global hero: one of the twenty-two volunteers
sent in to cap it, one of the five who had survived Site Zero and made it out again. Sam had freehold in
perpetuity, and the World Court in Geneva had decreed that lagan blooms were land-title pure and simple.
Sure, there were local magistrates, local ordinances and local prejudices to reckon with, but the Quarantine
was officially over, the last of the embargoes lifted-both made a laughing stock by the sheer extent of the
bloom outbreaks and their consistently benign nature. A disfigured, forty-nine-year-old MF veteran and
widower on a UN life pension had recourse to legal aid as well. Looking down at the four-lobed curving hump
of the bloom, Sam knew he was king of all that he surveyed and that, in all probability, his kingdom would be
an alien domain for the next year or so.
Within fourteen minutes, orbiting spysats had logged it. Within forty, Mayor Catherine was in her living
room with their local Alien Influences Officer, Ross Jimmins, to log the official registration, and a dozen lagan
fishers were at the end of his drive waiting to bid for trawling rights. Protection agents and insurance reps
were at his door too, offering assistance against the usual: everything from highly organized looters to salting
by disgruntled neighbors. But Sam was a UN vet. Within the hour, there were two AIO lagan custodians at
his front gate wearing blue arm-bands, and the usually strident hucksters pacing up and down the gravel drive
had become unusually courteous.
"How soon before the hedges form?" Sam asked Mayor Catherine, sounding both cautious and eager, still
not sure about the whole thing. Catherine was the closest thing to a rocket scientist Tilby had, a handsome,
middle-aged woman with steel-grey hair, looking the perfect, latter-day nasa-chik in her navy-blue jumpsuit.
The NASA look. The imprimatur of discipline and professional responsibility. Who would have thought?
"It's still three to four days," she said, taking the AIO notepad from Jimmins and adding her verification
code. "Latest count, fourteen per cent of blooms don't hold. Remember that, Sam. They sink back."
"That's not many though," Ross Jimmins said, reassuring him, wishing Sam well with every puff on his
lagan-dross day-pipe. The pipe was carved from lagan horn, a length of hollowed lattice from a "living" hedge.
As well as the wonderful fragrance the slow-combusting dross gave off, somewhere between gardenia and the
finest aromatic tobaccos of the previous four centuries, there was a welter of other positive side-effects, and
the molecularly atrophying horn itself scattered its own immune-enhancing dusting of euphorines on the warm
morning air.
"It is like some intelligence is behind it," Sam said, looking out through the big view window, and knew
how inane it sounded coming from him, the Tilby Tiger, the great skeptic.
Catherine gave a wry smile. "It's good to have you back in the world. We lost you there for a while."
"At least Jeanie didn't see me like this." Sam had resolved he wouldn't say it, but there it was.
The Mayor looked off at the fields and hills, out to where a tiny orange bus was bringing more science
students from the local high school to do a real-time, hands-on site study of early bloom effect. "Jeanie didn't
and it's not what I meant, Sam." She changed her tone. "So, what are you going to do about it? Lease it
out?"
Sam was grateful. "You think I should? Let them wall it off, rig up processing gantries? Put storage
modules down there?" Stop me seeing it, he didn't add.