"R. A. Lafferty - Melchisedek 03 - Argo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

with human sound but not with usual words. It was the vocalized
thought-speaking that primordial persons use so easily and understand so
universally. Later in the morning she would be using usual words, all of the
early people being fast learners. She had a swept-back face that was a bit
fish-like, and a bit teras-like, and a bit troll-like. Nice looking, but
behind that face she was toothed more massively than are most of the people
you know.
"I had a work order to come and get you and wake you up," the man
stid, "What a way to run a hotel! Someone leaves an order with the desk
clerk to be wakened in forty thousand years and it might not even be the
desk clerk on duty when that time comes around. And it was a hard cold
journey to come for you. Why couldn't you have used an alarm clock like
anyone else?"
"Oh poor you," the woman said, and a lot of her was already out of
the ice. She used words at random, but the expressions and messages were
clear enough. "I almost feel sorry for you," she was saying, "but I know
that you can't really be cold with those golden combings on you. We had
heard about them, but we could never find them. Oh poor monkey faces too!
But you don't resent having to come and get me, not when we are such good
friends as we really are."
"When I'm running The Argo (that's the name of the Ship frozen in
the ice below us there), I have quite a few of these work orders to fill,"
the magus said. "I never know where they come from or why, and some of them
do not seem to have much reason. This is the ship that can go where no other
ship would ever reach, the ship that can find places that would otherwise be
lost forever. But I like to understand my missions as well as I may. Who are
you?"
"Ewaglouwshkoul, of course," said the fair woman with that pleasant
big-mouthedness that so many of the older families have. "Who did you think
I was?"
"Oh, Little Eva, yes, of course. There's one in every era."
"The Neanderthal Eve, I suppose they would call me, using your own
words," she said, beginning herself to use a few real words mixed in with
her thought-speaking. "It would be a sort of nickname. But I'm not the first
woman of my tribe. I'm the last, I guess. There was only myself, and I
underaged, and thirteen of our fellows left, and things were going badly
with us. Every day we went out to fight and every day we got whipped. Then
our ghostly mentor suggested that some of us should go into cold storage for

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a very long time, and we would be awakened when things looked more peaceful.
I decided that I would go into freeze, and the thirteen fellows all took
different courses of action. One or two of them went into freeze also, I
think. And some others of them may have survived somewhere. If not, it's a
real loss. We have so much to give. I'm sure that there are a lot of my
half-blood kindred around, but we'd like to preserve the real thing if we
could. Pride in stock, and all of that. I was about to say that everybody
knows me, but the everybodies who knew me are mostly dead by now. Since I am