"Richard A. Lupoff - Sail the Tide of Mourning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lupoff Richard A)

interstellar winds she encountered on her great arcing course. There
would be no need to start her auxiliary engines, to annihilate any of the
precious rod of collapsed matter that hung suspended through the long
axis of Djanggawul, where it provided the artificial gravity for the ship.

Sky heroes swarmed the storage deck of the ship, readying Nurundere's
lighter for Jiritzu. They fitted the tiny ship with food concentrate, tested
her recyclers, tried her hinged mast fittings, and clamped the masts to the
hull of the lighter in anticipation of her catapulting from the deck of
Djanggawul.

When the lighter was fully prepared, the sky hero Baime went to
Djanggawul's bridge to inform Nurundere and Uraroju. Others in the
work party hauled the lighter from its place in the storage deck, refixed
the now vacant moorings that had held the lighter, and worked the tiny
ship through a great cargo hatch onto the main deck of Djanggawul.

High above the deck Jiritzu stood balanced lightly on a spar near the
top of a mainmast. He was dressed like any sky hero of the crew of
Djanggawul, in white trousers and canvas shoes, black knitted cap and
turtleneck sweater, the costume declared by Yurakosi tradition to have
been the costume of the sky heroes' ancestors on O'Earth.

A tiny radio had been implanted behind one ear, and strapped to his
thigh was a close-air generator. The oxygen-rich mixture that it slowly
emitted clung to Jiritzu, providing him with the air he needed for breath,
insulating him from the extreme temperatures of space, providing an
invisible pressure suit that protected him from the vacuum all around.

He watched the cargo hatch roll slowly back onto the deck beneath him,
the one of Djanggawul's three identical outer decks most easily accessible
from the lighter's storage place, and watched his fellow sky heroes haul the
lighter onto the deck. He kept his radio turned off, and by tacit agreement
no man or woman of Djanggawul's crew, not even Jiritzu's kunapi half
Dua, approached the mast he had climbed or made any sign of knowing of
his presence.

Nurundere himself strode from the bridge of his ship to inspect the
lighter, now standing empty on the deck. Jiritzu could tell him easily, not
merely by his distinctive cap of white with its wide black band, but by his
pale skin, the protective pigmentation of the Yurakosi almost totally faded
now, whited out by the passing years and long exposure to the radiation of
the naked stars.

Soon Nurundere would have to return to Yurakosi himself, give himself
over to the life of a ground squirmer, crawl with the small children and the
old men and women of Yurakosi, the only inhabitants of the planet whose
able sons and daughters were desperately needed to sail the membrane
ships between the stars.