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

They made quite a team-a vet skeptic with a face ruined by MF, a town mayor looking like a shuttle-butt
spaceways groupie from the nineties, a pipe-smoking AIO officer, and a small-time entrepreneur who did the
culture-speak of mid-twentieth rural USA.
They started early each morning and left off around 1300, with Howard often as not staying on at the
sorting trays till sunset when the last of the afternoon's tek and spec groups had gone-whichever AIO officials
were rostered for that day's site check.
It was funny how much of an unspoken routine it all was. By the time Sam had disengaged the perimeter
sensors and AIO alarms around 0700, the four of them were there, ready to set off in pairs, carefully locating
the newbies and keying spot and spec codes into notepads for their own constantly updating operations
program and the AIO global master.
It was on a spell during one of these start-up checks, after Sam had pointed to a perfect cloudform lagan
building on one of the hedges, that Howard told him about the name.
"You know what lagan originally was?"
 Sam just stared; it seemed such an odd question. "I thought it was named after the river in that old Irish
song. You know, My Lagan Love. They're always playing it."
"Most people think that. No. It's from the language of shipwreck. Flotsam, jetsam and lagan. Flotsam is
wreckage that floats when a ship goes down. Jetsam is what's thrown overboard to lighten her. Jetsam when
it's jettisoned, see. If it floats, it's flotsam. If it sinks, it's lagan. A lot of valuable stuff was marked with buoys
so they could retrieve it later. There were salvage wars over it. Deliberate wrecking, especially on the coast of
Cornwall and around the Scillies. Lights set during storms to lure ships onto rocks. Lamps tied to the horns
of cows-'horn beacons' they called 'em. Whole families involved. Whole communities."
"So why that name now? Lagan?"
"Some scientist came up with it. These are floats from somewhere else, aren't they? Buoys poking
through. Lines leading down to stuff."
"I've never heard this."
Howard looked at him as if to say: You've been out of it for quite a while.
"Lots of folks haven't. But it's true. We get whatever comes up from the 'seabed.' "
"But-"
"Okay, don't say it! There's no line. No seabed. It's how the whole thing goes-first the shelltop like yours
last week, then the bounty is hauled up."
"But it's not down is it, Howard? And it isn't hauled up. Words hide it. Tidy it up too much."
"Okay, but they help us live with it."
"And hide it. How's the weather? How's the lagan? Geologists and seismologists doing their tests all the
time, finding nothing. No pressure variables under the caps. None of the expected physics. It's all so PC."
"See my point, Sam. The blooms link to somewhere else, somewhere out of sight, to something worth
waiting for. Stuff comes up; you get the hedges with bits of lagan in them like fish in a net. At the very least,
you get chunks of molybdenum and diamond-S and those funny little spindles of-what're those new
words?-crowfenter and harleybine? Now and then there's the gold and silver."
"But no Nobel Prizes yet."
"What? Oh, right. No, no Nobel Prizes in those hedges so far. No real answers."
"See, there's another word. Hedges."
"They follow roads and field lines, Sam. That's what hedges do. Hedges is what they are."
"Hides it, Howie."
"Hasn't stopped you."
Which was too close to the truth and too soon in their friendship right then, so they both gladly changed
the subject. It was made easier by Mayor Catherine dumping her sample bag on the sorting table.
"New tally," she said. "Eighty-two viable. Sixteen fallow."
Howard keyed the totals into his notepad. "Sounds right. Everyone gets twenty percent that are empty."
"Looted?" Sam asked.
"Don't see how. Just empty. Nothing when the hedges form. Air pockets."