"Elizabeth Lynn - The Sardonyx Net" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lynn Elizabeth A)

"Tell Cara I'll see her here this afternoon. And one last thing. Send a communigram to my brother."

Binkie's training held, his face and voice did not change, but his long pale hands fisted at his sides.
"What message?"

"Send a precis of these letters. Let me see it first. Include the report from Sovka, the letter from
Sherrix, and the one from Ferris Dur. And you'd better include the threat. The Net should be off
Enchanter. Send a message capsule with a 'For-Your-Eyes-Only' seal. The whole sector doesn't need to
know our business, so leave the Yago crest off the capsule, and omit the place of origin. Zed will know."

"As you wish, Rhani-ka." He took the letters from her, and went to the compscreen to draft the
precis. Rhani gazed out her window. The familiar image of the breedery in Sovka -- white buildings,
orange grass broken by the bleak wire fencing of the kerit runs -- superimposed itself upon the even
more familiar green. The death of eighteen Prime Strain kerits was going to hurt the breeding program.
The manager sounded badly flustered. At least he had been able to keep the news of the deaths from
leaking out to PIN. He had been her mother's appointment to the position; Rhani had been planning to
suggest to him that he should retire.

And something was wrong with Ferris Dur, if he thought he could order her to meet him, as if she
were his employee or his slave, and not in fact his equal, and head herself of the Third Family of Chabad.
She remembered him vaguely from the last few months when Domna Sam had been so sick, giving
orders to the house slaves; he had struck her then as an arrogant, impatient man. She wondered what he
thought was so important that she would drop her work to see him, and why he didn't simply tell her
what it was. Eventually he would.

The veins in the polished marble of her desk gleamed in the sunlight. That was something else
Chabad produced: stone. But there were few quarries on the planet: workers and machines could not
endure the glare of Chabad's sun, and the breakdown rate for both was ridiculously high. Rhani traced
the patterns with one finger. The marble was lovely and cool. The drying up of the drug supply worried
her badly, and she hoped it would not go on long. It had never happened this severely before.

Chabad had to have dorazine. It was the glue that held the slave system together; without it, the men
and women who did most of the labor on Chabad would grow sullen and angry, resentful of their
penitential status; they would plan and scheme and ultimately rebel. Without dorazine, Chabad would
need an army to keep them at their jobs; with dorazine, all it needed was the drug. It often struck her, the
irony of the Federation statutes that made transport of dorazine to the sector illegal. The law was a sop
thrown to those who felt that slavery (unlike prisons, brain-wipe, forced therapy, etc.) was immoral, and
yet the moralists could not see that dorazine was the one element that made slavery endurable for most of
the slaves, that kept them docile and sane, most of the time. It was the moralists who had created The
Pharmacy and the drug runners, not Chabad.

Rhani contemplated, for a few moments, making the formal request of the Federation of Living
Worlds that the sale of dorazine to Chabad be made legal. Legalization would slash the black market
price. It might even force The Pharmacy, whoever and wherever it was, to sell her the dorazine formula.
For five years, Sherrix -- and Domino four years before her -- had sent a message through the drug
network to The Pharmacy: "_Name a price. Family Yago will buy_." They had never answered; Rhani
did not even know if the offer had reached them. There _was_ precedent for a Yago to approach the
Federation. But she shook her head; only for an emergency would she consider bringing Chabad to the
attention of the Federation. It was easier for them all to buy the euphoric/tranquilizer on the illegal market