"M. John Harrison - Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

Mau lived, leaking realistically from the joints of its several yellowish legs, stridulating every so often for
no reason she could see. Its bony-looking head had more palps, mosaic eyes and ropes of mucous than
she preferred to look at. It wasn't something you could ignore.
'You know who we are,' it said.
'Do you think it's so clever to surprise a K-ship like that?' shouted Seria Mau.
The fetch clicked patiently.
'We were not trying to embarrass you,' it said. 'We approached in a perfectly op en way. You have
been ignoring our transmissions since you did . . . ' It paused as if searching for a word; then, clearly at a
loss, concluded uneasily: 'This.'
'That was a moment ago.'
'That was five hours ago,' the fetch said. 'We have been trying to talk to you since then.'
Seria Mau was so shaken she broke contact and тАФ as the fetch faded away into a kind of brown
smoke, a transparency of itself тАФ hid the White Cat in a cloud of asteroids some distance off, to give
herself time to think. She felt ashamed of herself. Why had she acted like that? What could she have been
thinking of to leave herself vulnerable like that, insensible out there for live hours? While she was trying to
remember, the Nastic vessel's mathematics began stalking her again, making two or three billion guesses
a nanosecond at her position. After a second or two she allowed it to find her. The fetch reformed
immediately.
'What would you understand,' Seria Mau asked it, 'by the idea, "Evidence of myself"?'
'Not much,' the fetch said. 'Is that why you did this? To leave evidence of yourself? Over here, we
wonder why you kill your own kind so ruthlessly.' Seria Mau had been asked this before.
'They're not my kind,' she said.
'They are human.'
She greeted this argument with the silence it deserved, then after a moment said:
'Where's the money?'
'Ah, the money. Where it always is.'
'I don't want local currency.'
'We almost never use local currencies,' the fetch said, 'although we sometimes deal in them.' Its larger
joints appeared to vent some kind of gas. 'Are you ready to fight again? We have several missions
available forty lights down the Beach. You would be up against military vessels. It's a real part of the war,
not ambushing civilians like this.'
'Oh, your war,' she said dismissively. Fifty wars, big and small, were going on out here in plain sight of
the Kefahuchi Tract; but there was only one fight, and it was the fight over the spoils. She had never even
asked them who their enemy was. She didn't want to know. The Nastic were strange enough. Generally,
it was impossible to understand the motives of aliens. 'Motives,' she thought, staring at the collection of
legs and eyes in front of her, 'are a sensorium thing. They are an Umwelt thing. The cat has a hard job to
imagine the motives of the housefly in its mouth.' She thought about this. 'The housefly has a harder job,'
she decided.
'I have what I want now,' she told the fetch. 'I won't be fighting for you again.'
'We could offer more.'
'It wouldn't help.'
'We could make you do what we want.'
Seria Mau laughed.
'I'll be gone from here faster than your vessel can think. How will you find me then? This is a K-ship.'
The fetch left a calculated silence.
'We know where you are going,' it said.
This gave Seria Mau a cold feeling, but only for a fraction of a second. She had what she wanted from
the Nastic. Let them try. She broke contact and opened the ship's mathematical space.
'Look at that!' the mathematics greeted her. 'We could go there. Or there. Or look, there. We could
go anywhere. Let's go somewhere!'