"Learning The World" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacLeod Ken)

"Yes."

Thumbs went down, the switch clicked, clockwork whirred.

"Flap!" shouted Orro.

Darvin beat his wings up and down, imagining himнself in level flight, facing into an imagined slipstream.

"Flap harder!"

Darvin realised he'd been subconsciously afraid of his wing tips hitting the floor. They were in fact well clear. He flapped harder, almost rising out of the harнness, until a much faster flapping sound told him the reel of film had run out.

"All right, stop," said Orro. He dismounted the film from the camera, placed it in a round flat can and laнbelled it before stalking over to help Darvin out of the harness. Orro's toe-claws, as usual overgrown, made scratching sounds on the floor that set Darvin's teeth on edge.

"How did it look?" asked Darvin, folding his wings behind his elbows and flexing his hands.

"A start," said Orro. "I can't say it looked terribly realistic, but at least I got half a minute of wingbeats. We may have to try something else."

Darvin glanced sidelong at the harness. "As you say," he said, "a start."

He walked out of the test area and into the main part of the lab. The walls, in between shelving, were almost covered with tacked-up pieces of paper scrawled with calculations or sketches of several failed designs. The long table was cluttered with hand tools, among the crumpled wings, smashed noses and cannibalised enнgines of at least a dozen crashed model chiropters. The smells of wood glue and solder hung over it like a miнasma. In a corner lay the engine nacelle of a dirigible. The propeller was as wide as a human wingspan. Gods knew from where Orro had scrounged that piece of exнpensive junk. A fugitive thought stirred in Darvin's mind as he gazed at it. Then the insight, whatever it had been, was gone. He shook his head. No doubt it would come back. He had a vague disquiet at the prospect.

"When do I see the result?" he asked.

Orro straightened, thrusting the can into his belt satchel. "Tomorow," he said. "If I take it straight to the development lab."

"Oh," said Darvin. He had forgotten that part of the kinematographic process. "All right. Give me a bell when you get it back."

"Of course," said Orro. His face brightened. "It is just a start, but it's a historic start."

"I wouldn't want to miss it," Darvin said, as they left the lab. Orro locked the door. The frosted wired glass bore, in barbed Gevorkian script, the legend Departнment of Aeronautical Research. KEEP OUT. There was no Department of Aeronautical Research, and Orro had not known that Gevorkian script was, in the cartoons and playbills of Seloh's Reach, a conventional signifier of the at once scientific and sinister. Probably, Darvin reflected, he still didn't. The exiled physicist still afнfected surprise at encountering journals and discourses written in Selohic.

At the end of the corridor the two scientists paused at the ledge.

"See you tomorrow, then," said Darvin.

Orro nodded. "Or tonight, perhaps."

"Perhaps," said Darvin, with mild surprise. No doubt the usually sombre Gevorkian felt he had someнthing to celebrate. "After you," he added.

Orro nodded again and stepped to the edge. He raised his arms and unfolded his wings and dived forward, swooping away down about a hundred feet and banking around and back in to the lower floor where the technical labs were located. Darvin sprang harder from the ledge and with vigorous downbeats lifted himself higher, ridнing the Physics Building's updraft and soaring over the Modern Languages Tower, on whose flat roof idle stuнdents sunned themselves or groomed each other. He climbed higher; the midafternoon air was static and hot, caught between the sea and the mountains, from which the morning and evening breezes respectively came. Over the town it was trapped between the beach and the cliffs. Darvin ascended a few hundred feet to clifftop height, catching a cooler current as he gazed across miles of yellow grassland to the deeper ochre of the higher cliffs that marked the broader tableland of the ulнterior. Pylons bearing transport and telephone cables marched across that distance like a single file of giants. Prey herds grazed the grass, great patches of dark like the shadows of absent clouds, clustered around the waнterways that meandered across the plain to tumble into the five ravines which gave the town its name.

He wheeled. The blue of the Broad Channel reнfreshed his sight as much as the high air cooled his skin. Sullied by steamship smoke, spotted by the black of sails, the Channel was still an immense and soothнing body of water which even at this height went clear to the horizon. Darvin wondered whether Orro ever climbed high enoughЧthousands of feetЧto see all the way across it to the Realm of Gevork. It struck him as unlikely. Nostalgia, to the best of Darvin's knowlнedge, was not among his colleague's pains. Glancing upward, to that fancied height, Darvin noted the dark speck of a dirigible of Seloh's Right, patient in its paнtrol. An obscure sense that he had trespassed troubled him. It was not a feeling he associated with, or wished to have in, the sky. He dropped.

From the top of his downward spiral, Five Ravines looked like a freak regular woodland, a vast elaboraнtion of an abandoned enclosure on the grasslands where trees sprouted because their saplings could not be cropped by the prey. Trees lined its streets and filled its parks and gardens: fruit trees for the most part, not so much from deliberate planting as from seeds spat or (in ruder times) shat by people on the wing. Trudges hauled carts along the streets, here and there making way for the noisy, fuming motor vehicles. The town was divided by the watercourses of the rivers from the ravines, united by its roads and bridges and sky-wires. The ravines converged, the streams diverged; from a sufficient height they showed a pattern like outspread wings. Expensive roosting and offices covered the verнdant cliffs of the ravines; cheaper and more recent buildings crowded the riversides to the shore, like wooden gulleys. Among such were the university's faculties and departments; its charter, centuries old, was younger by far than that of the borough.

Darvin's own office was in the Faculty of Impractiнcal Sciences, whose five-floor wooden building was little different from the town roosts on either side of it. Darvin skimmed the topmost branches of one of the street's trees and swooped to the fourth-floor landing platform signboarded University of Five Ravines. Deнpartment of Astronomy. Sweating and panting from his exertions and the renewed heat, he strolled to the entranceway's array of wicker baskets and checked his post. A broad and thick package awaited him. He hefted it with satisfaction as he hurried to his room. An eight-nights' worth of photographic plates, despatched from the observatory in the high desert. Each night usually afforded at least eight plates. Checking them all could take up most of his working time for eight days, and then the next set would arrive by the cable-car post, just as impatiently awaited.

A year's accumulation of such packages and their plates made up a small proportion of the clutter in his room. First things first: he set the pot over the brazier and chewed some leaf while waiting for the tea to brew. The leaf relaxed his muscles and cleared his head, and the tea took away the aftertaste. He gazed absently at the old wall poster of the solar system, given away in a special issue of a children's popular science magazine: the picture that had first inflamed his interest in astronomy.