"EB - Edward L. Ferman - The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction 23rd EditionUC - SS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)

He held the bottle out to her. "Have a drink?"
She shook her head, eyes hooded and expressionless, and then Nolan remembered that she didn't speak English. He raised the bottle and drank again, cursing himself for his mistake.
It had been a mistake, he realized that now, but Darlene would never understand. Sitting there safe and snug in the apartment in Trenton, she couldn't begin to know what he'd gone through for her sakeЧhers and Uttle Robbie's. Robert Emmett Nolan n, nine weeks
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old now, his son, whom he'd never seen. That's why he'd taken the job, signed on with the company for a year. The money was good, enough to keep Darlene in comfort and tide them over after he got back. She couldn't have come with him, not while she was carrying the kid, so he came alone, figuring no sweat.
No sweat. That was a laugh. All he'd done since he got here was sweat. Patrolling the plantation at sunup, loading cargo all day for the boats that went downriver, squinting over paperwork while night closed down on the bungalow to imprison him behind a wall of jungle darkness. And at night the noises cameЧthe hum of insect hordes, the bellow of caimans, the snorting snuffle of peccary, the ceaseless chatter of monkeys intermingled with the screeching of a milling mindless birds.
So he'd started to drink. First the good bourbon from the company's stock, then the halfway-decent trade gin, and now the cheap rum.
As Nolan set the empty bottle down he heard the noise he'd come to dread worst of allЧthe endless echo of drums from the huts huddled beside the riverbank below. Miserable wretches were at it again. No wonder he had to drive them daily to fulfil the company's quota. The wonder was that they did anything at all after spending every night wailing to those damned drums.
Of course it was Moises who did the actual driving; Nolan couldn't even chew them out properly because they were too damned dumb to understand plain English.
Like Nina, here.
Again Nolan looked down at the girl who lay curled beside him on the bed, silent and sated. She wasn't sweating; her skin was curiously cool to the touch, and in her eyes was a mystery.
It was the mystery that Nolan had sensed the first time he saw her staring at him across the village compound three days ago. At first he thought she was one of the company peopleЧsomebody's wife, daughter, sister. That afternoon, when he returned to the bungalow, he caught her staring at him again at the edge of the clearing. So he asked Moises who she was, and Moises didn't know. Apparently she'd just arrived a day or two before, paddling a crude catamaran downriver from somewhere out of the denser jungle stretching a thousand miles beyond. She had no English, and according to Moises, she didn't speak Spanish or Portuguese either. Not that she'd
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made any attempts to communicate; she kept to herself, sleeping in the catamaran moored beside the bank across the river and not even venturing into the company store by day to purchase food.
"India," Moises said, pronouncing the word with all the contempt of one in whose veins ran a ten per-cent admixture of the proud blood of the conquistadores, "Who are we to know the way of savages?" He shrugged.
Nolan had shrugged, too, and dismissed her from his mind. But that night as he lay on his bed, listening to the pounding of the drums, he thought of her again and felt a stirring in his loins.
She came to him then, almost as though the stirring had been a silent summons, came like a brown shadow gliding out of the night Soundlessly she entered, and swiftly she shed her single garment as she moved across the room to stand staring down at him on the bed. Then, as she sank upon his nakedness and encircled his thighs, the stirring in his loins became a throbbing and the pounding in his head drowned out the drums.
In the morning she was gone, but on the following night she returned. It was then that he'd called her NinaЧit wasn't her name, but he felt a need to somehow identify this wide-mouthed, pink-tongued stranger who slaked herself upon him, slaked his own urgency again and again as her hissing breath rasped in his ears.
Once more she vanished while he slept, and he hadn't seen her all day. But at times he'd been conscious of her secret stare, a coldness falling upon him like an unglimpsed shadow, and Jde'd known that tonight she'd come again.
Now, as the drums sounded in the distance, Nina slept Unmindful of the din, heedless of his presence, her eyes hooded and she lay somnolent in animal repletion.
Nolan shuddered. That's what she was; an animal. In repose, the lithe brown body was grotesquely elongated, the wide mouth accentuating the ugliness of her face. How could he have coupled with this creature? Nolan grimaced in self-disgust as he turned away.
Well, no matterЧit was ended now, over once and for all. Today the message had arrived from Belem: Darlene and Robbie were on the ship, ready for the flight to Manaos. Tomorrow morning he'd start downriver to meet them, escort them here. He'd had his qualms about their coming; they'd have to face three months hi this hellhole before the year was up, but Darlene had insisted.
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And she was right Nolan knew it now. At least they'd be together and that would help see him through. He wouldn't need the bottle any more, and he wouldn't need Nina.
Nolan lay back and waited for sleep to come, shutting out the sound of the drums, the sight of the shadowy shape beside him. Only a few hours until morning, he told himself. And in the morning, the nightmare would be over.
The trip to Manaos was an ordeal, but it ended in Darlene's arms. She was blonder and more beautiful than he'd remembered, more loving and tender than he'd ever known her to be, and in the union that was their reunion Nolan found fulfillment Of course there was none of the avid hunger of Nina's coiling caresses, none of the mindless thrashing to final frenzy. But it didn't matter; the two of them were together at hist. The two of them, and Robbie.
Robbie was a revelation.
Nolan hadn't anticipated the intensity of his own reaction. But now, after the long trip back in the wheezing launch, he stood beside the crib in the spare bedroom and gazed down at his son with an overwhelming surge of pride.
"Isn't he adorable?" Darlene said. "He looks just like you."
"You're prejudiced" Nolan grinned, but he was flattered. And when the tiny pink starshell of a hand reached forth to meet his fingers, he tingled at the touch.
Then Darlene gasped.
Nolan glanced up quickly. "What's the matter?" he said.
"Nothing." Darlene was staring past him. "I thought I saw someone outside the window."
Nolan followed her gaze. "No one out there." He moved to the window, peered at the clearing beyond. "Not a soul."
Darlene passed a hand before her eyes. "X guess Fm just overtired," she said. "The long trip-"
Nolan put his arm around her. "Why don't you go lie down? Mama Dolores can look after Robbie."
Darlene hesitated. "Are you sure she knows what to do?"
"Look who's talking!" Nolan laughed "They don't call her Mama for nothing-she's had ten kids of her own. She's in the kitchen right now, fixing Robbie's formula. HI go get her."
So Darlene went down the hall to their bedroom for a siesta, and
Mama Dolores took over Robbie's schedule while Nolan made his daily rounds in the fields.
The heat was stifling, worse than anything he could remember. Even Moises was gasping for air as he gunned the jeep over the rutted roadway, peering into the shimmering haze.
Nolan wiped his forehead. Maybe he'd been too hasty, bringing Darlene and the baby here. But a man was entitled to see his own son, and in a few months they'd be out of this miserable sweatbox forever. No sense getting uptight; everything was going to be all right
But at dusk, when he returned to the bungalow, Mama Dolores greeted him at the door with a troubled face.
"What is it?" Nolan said. "Something wrong with Robbie?"
Mama shook her head. "He sleeps like an angel," she murmured "But the senora-"