"Charles L. Harness - The Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

For her hump had split open, and something had flopped clumsily out of it, and she was drifting gently
outward into blackness.

Chapter Sixteen
The glum face of Ruy Jacques peered out through the studio window into the night-awakening Via.

Before I met you, he brooded, loneliness was a magic, ecstatic blade drawn across my heart strings; it
healed the severed strands with every beat, and I had all that I wanted save what I had to haveтАФthe Red
Rose. My search for that Rose alone matters! I must believe this. I must not swerve, even for the
memory of you, Anna, the first of my own kind I have ever met. I must not wonder if they killed you, nor
even care. They must have killed you...It's been three weeks.

Now I can see the Rose again. Onward into loneliness.

He sensed the nearness of familiar metal behind him. "Hello, Martha," he said, without turning. "Just get
here?"

"Yes. How's the party going?" Her voice seemed carefully expressionless.

"Fair. You'll know more when you get the liquor bill."

"Your ballet opens tonight, doesn't it?" Still that studied tonelessness.

"You know damn well it doesn't." His voice held no rancor. "La Tanid took your bribe and left for
Mexico. It's just as well. I can't abide a prima ballerina who'd rather eat than dance." He frowned slightly.
Every bit of metal on the woman was singing in secret elation. She was thinking of a great
triumphтАФsomething far beyond her petty victory in wrecking his opening night. His searching mind
caught hints of something intricate, but integrated, completedтАФand deadly. Nineteen equations. The
Jacques Rosette. Sciomnia.

"So you've finished your toy," he murmured. "You've got what you wanted, and you think you've
destroyed what I wanted."

Her reply was harsh, suspicious. "How did you know, when not even Grade is sure? Yes, my weapon is
finished. I can hold in one hand a thing that can obliterate your whole Via in an instant. A city, even a
continent would take but a little longer. Science versus Art! Bah! This concrete embodiment of
biophysics is the answer to your puerile RenaissanceтАФyour precious feather-bed world of music and
painting! You and your kind are helpless when I and my kind choose to act. In the final analysis Science
means forceтАФthe ability to control the minds and bodies of men."

The shimmering surface of his mind was now catching the faintest wisps of strange, extraneous
impressions, vague and disturbing, and which did not seem to originate from metal within the room. In
fact, he could not be sure they originated from metal at all.

He turned to face her. "How can Science control all men when it can't even control individualsтАФAnna
van Tuyl, for example?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "You're only partly right. They failed to find her, but her escape was pure
accident. In any event, she no longer represents any danger to me or to the political group that I control.
Security has actually dropped her from their shoot-on-sight docket."