"Elliott,.Kate.-.Jaran.-.Sunseeker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elliott Kate)

SUNSEEKER
Kate Elliott

THEY gave her a berth on the Ra because her father was famous, not because he was rich. Wealth was no guarantor of admittance to the ranks of the fabled Sunseekers; their sponsors didn't need the money. But there was always a price to be paid, due at unforeseen intervals decided upon by the caprice of the self-appointed leaders of their intrepid little band of a dozen or so sunseeking souls.
Right now, they had started in on Eleanor, an elegant girl of Bantu ancestry whose great-grands had made their fortune gun-running along the Horn of Africa (so it was rumored) and parlayed that wealth into a multisystem exotics import/export business.
"Sweetkins, I'm not sure I can stand to look at much more of that vegetable fiber. Cotton!"
"Algodon!" Akvir mimicked Zenobia's horrified tone. "I thought we'd agreed to wear only animal products."
"If we don't hold to standards," continued Zenobia, "it'll be soybric next. Or, Goddess forbid, nylon."
Eleanor met this sally with her usual dignified silence. She did not even smooth a hand over her gold and brown robe and trousers, as any of the others would have, self-conscious under scrutiny. Rose suspected her of having designs both on AkvirЧself-styled priest of the SunseekersЧand on the coveted position of priestess. Of course it went without saying that the priestess and the priest had their own intimate rites, so after all, if one was priestess, one got AkvirЧat least for as long as his sway over the group held.
"That a tattoo?" Yah-noo plopped down beside Rose. The seat cushion exhaled sharply under the pressure of his rump. He was new on board, and already bored.
"What?" Self-consciously, rememberingЧhow could she ever, ever forget?Чshe touched the blemish on her cheek.
"Brilliantщ, mon," he said, although the slang sounded forced. He was too clean-cut to look comfortable in the leather trousers and vest he sported. He looked made up, a rich-kid doll sold in the marketplace for poor kids to play pretend with. "Makes a nice statement, cutting up the facial lines with a big blotch like that. It's not even an image tattoo, like a tigre or something, just aЧ" He paused, searching for words.
She already knew the words.
Blot. Eyesore. Flaw. Birth defect.
She was irrevocably marred. Disfigured. Stained.
These words proclaimed by that famous voice which most every soul on this planet and in most of the other human systems would recognize. Golden-tongued and golden-haired. Chryso-stom. Sun-struck. El Sol. There were many epithets for him, almost all of them flattering.
"Ya se ve!" Yah-noo clapped himself on the head with an open hand, a theatrical display of sudden insight. "You're the actor's kid, no? You look like himЧ"
"If never so handsome," said Akvir, who had bored of his pursuit of Eleanor.
"No one is as handsome as my father," snapped Rose, for that was both her pride and her shame.
"I thought there were operations, lasers, that kind of thing." Yah-noo stared at her with intense curiosity.
To see a blemished person was rare. To see one anywhere outside the ranks of the great lost, the poor who are always with us in their shacks and hovels and rags even in this day of medical clinics in every piss-poor village and education for every forlorn or unwanted child, was unheard of.
"Yeah, there are," she said, standing to walk over to Eleanor's seat. She stared out the tinted window of the ship. The Surbrent-Xia solar array that powered the engines made the stubby wings shimmer as light played across them. Here, above the cloud cover that shrouded the western Caribbean, the sun blazed in all its glory. Ever bright. Up here, following the sunside of the Earth, it was always day.
"You going to see the big head?" asked Eleanor in her lean, cultured voice. "The archaeological site is called after a saint. San Lorenzo."
"Yah. Sounds very slummy, a little Meshko village and all."
"Quaint," said Eleanor. "The right word is quaint. Saint Lorenzo was one of the seven deacons of the Church of Rome, this would be back, oh, way back during the actual Roman Empire when the old ChristianЧ" She said it like a girl's name, Kristie-Anne. "ЧChurch was just getting a toehold in the world. Like all of them, he was made a martyr, but in this case he was roasted over a gridiron."
"Over a football field?"
"No." Eleanor laughed but not in a mocking way. She never used her knowledge to mock people. "No, it's like a thing with bars you grill fish on. But the thing is, that he was burned, roasted, so you see perhaps he was in a prior incarnation related to some form of sun worship. The fire is a metaphor for the sun."
"Oh. I guess it could be."
Eleanor shrugged. Rose could never understand why someone like her ran with the Sunseekers. Only except they were, so everyone said, the jettest black of all social sets, the crшme de la crшme, the egg in the basket, the two unobtainable birds in the bush. That was why her father never came running after her after she ran away to them.
Wasn't it?
She had seen a clip about two months ago as the night-bound told time, for up here in the constant glare of the sun there was only one long long day. He had referred to her in passing, with that charmingly deprecatory smile.
"Ah, yes, my daughter Rosie, she's on a bit of a vacation with that Sunseeker crowd. That's true, most of them are older, finished with their A-levels or gymnasium or high school. But. Well. She's a high-spirited girl. Fifteen-year-olds always know just what they want, don't they? She wanted the Sunseekers." The rest went without saying: The very most exclusive social set, don't you know. Of course my child would be admitted into their august ranks.
He had only to quirk his lips and shift his elbow on the settee to reveal these confidences without any additional words passing his lips. His gift consisted, as so many, many, many people had assured her as she grew up and old enough to understand what their praise meant, of the ability to suggest much with very little.
But her elder siblingsЧlong since estranged from the familyЧ called it something else: The ability to blind.
The engines thrummed. Rose set a hand against the pane that separated them from the air and felt the shudder and shift that meant they were descending. In the lounge, Yah-noo flipped through the music files. The mournful cadences of an old Len-non-McCartney aria, "I'll Follow the Sun," filled the cabin. Eleanor uncoiled herself from her seat and walked back, not without a few jerks to keep her balance as the pitch of the Ra steepened, to the dressing and shower room, shared indiscriminately by the almost two dozen inhabitants of the ship. She did dress, stubbornly, in fabrics woven from vegetable forebears. Rose admired her intransigence but more than that the drape of the cloth itself, something leather cured in the sun or spinsil extruded and spun and woven in the airless vaults of space stations could not duplicate. Style, her father always said, sets apart those who are watch-able from those fated only to watch. It puzzled and irritated him that his disfigured daughter had no sense of style, but she had only ever seen him actually lose his temper once in her entire life: that day in the hospital when her mother had backed her up after she stubbornly refused, once again and for all, to undergo the simple laser operation that would at least make her middling pretty.
He wanted to be surrounded by handsome things.
The ship turned as it always did before landing, going down rump first, as some of the Sunseekers liked to say. Her hand on the pane warmed as the rising sun's rays melted into her palm. They cut down through the clouds and the sun vanished. She shivered. Gray boiled up past her, receded into the sky as they came down below the clouds and could see the ground at last.
Rugged mountains rose close beside the shore of the sea, receding behind them. The lowlands were cut by ribbons of muddy water beside which sprawled the dirty brown and white scars of human habitation, a village. The old ruined Zona Arqueolєgica lay on higher ground, the centerpiece of a significant plateau.
It had been a week since they'd last landed. The texture of the earth, the lush green carpet of vegetation, amazed her anew. She blinked on her computer implant to get an identification of the river. A map of the region came up on the screen, not a real screen, of course, but the simulation of a screen that according to her tekhnъ class was necessary for the human eye to register information in this medium. Sim-screens for primates, they would shout when they were younger, but it was only funny when you were young enough to find the parallel between simulation and simian amusing, like being six years old and getting your first pun. But like a bad pun or a particularly obnoxious advert balloon, the phrase had stuck with her.
The lacy mat of tributaries and rivers floated in front of her eyes on the sim-screen, spidery lines that thickened and took on weight and texture, finally moving and melding into the landscape until they seemed to become one. Disoriented, she blinked the screen off and staggered back to find a couch for the final deceleration. The couch snaked a pressure net across her, calibrated to her weight, and she tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and waited for landing. Aria segued into gospel hymn, "Where the Sun Will Never Go Down." Yah-noo hummed along in a tuneless tenor until Zenobia told him to shut up. Finally, they came to rest; the altosphere shades lightened away and everything went quiet. She felt giddy. When she stood up, her feet hummed with the memory of engines and she swayed as she walked, following the others to the 'lock and out onto the plank that led down to the variegated earth of the night-bound, the lost soulsЧall fourteen billion of themЧwho must suffer the sad cyclic subjugation to the endless and cruel celestial reminder of our human mortality, night following day following night. Or so Akvir put it. He had not seen night for nine months.
The village itself was so small, so pathetic, and so obviously isolated that at first Rose thought they had inadvertently stumbled across the set for an actie, the kind of thing her father would star in: Knight in the Jungle, in which the liberation priest, Father Ignatius Knight, gives his life to bring literacy and the World-WideWeb to a village under the censorious thumb of a Machine Age dictator, or Dublo Seven, Heritage Hunter, in which the legendary M. Seven seeks out and recovers artifacts hidden away by greedy capitalists so that he can turn them over to the Human Heritage Foundation whose purpose is to preserve human culture for the all, not the few.
The air was so hot and humid that even her eyelids began to sweat. It stank of mud and cow dung. A pair of skeletally thin reddish dogs slunk along the tree line. Curious villagers emerged from houses and from the outlying fields and trees to converge on the landing spot, a cleared strip beside a broad concrete plaza marked by a flagpole and a school building. There were sure a lot of villagers, more than she had expected. A dilapidated museum stood by the river at one end of the road. The great Olmec head Akvir wanted to see rested in the central courtyard, glimpsed from here as a rounded bulk behind rusting wrought-iron gates. Right now Akvir was head-hunting, as he called it. In the last month they had stopped at Easter Island, Mount Rushmore, Angkor Thom, and the Altai Mountains.
A bird called from the trees. Eleanor stepped out in front of Akvir and raised a hand, shading her eyes against the early morning sunlight. But she was looking west, not east into the rising sun.
Rose felt more than heard the cough of an antiquated pulse gun. Dogs yipped frantically, helping and bolting, but the sound that bit into their hearing was too high for humans to make out.
"Effing hells!" swore Yah-noo behind her. "My transmitter's gone dead."
Who used pulse guns these days? They were part of the lore of her dad's acties, like in Evil Empire where he played a heroic West Berliner.
Eleanor shouted a warning as a dozen of the villagers circled in on them. Were the natives carrying rifles? For a second, Rose stared stupidly, thoughts scattering. What was going on?
Akvir started yelling. "Back on board! Back on board! Everyone back on board!"
Voices raised in alarm as the Sunseekers blundered toward the ramp, but their escape was cut short by the unexpected barking stutter of a scatter gun. A swarm of chitters lit on her skin. She dropped to her knees, swatting at her face and bare arms.
The crash of a riot cannonЧshe knew the sound because her father had just premiered in a serial actie about the Eleven Cities labor riots of fifty years agoЧboomed in her ears. A blast of smoke and heat passed right over her. As people yelled and screamed, she lost track of everything except the stink of skunk gas settling onto her shoulders and the prickles of irritant darts in the crooks of her elbows and the whorls of her ears.