"George R. R. Martin - Override" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

OVERRIDE

The only way to break free of a controlling force is to first recognize exactly what that force is
.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN

Dusk was settling softly over the High Lakes as Kabaraijian and his crew made their way home from
the caves. It was a calm, quiet dusk; a twilight blended of green waters and mellow night winds and the
slow fading of Grotto's gentle sun. From the rear of his launch, Kabaraijian watched it fall, and listened to
the sounds of twilight over the purring of the engine.
Grotto was a quiet world, but the sounds were there, if you knew how to listen. Kabaraijian knew.
He sat erect in the back of the boat, a slight figure with swarthy skin and long black hair and brown eyes
that drifted dreamy. One thin hand rested on his knee, the other, forgotten, on the motor. And his ears
listened; to the bubbling of the water in the wake of the launch, and the swish-splash of the lakeleapers
breaking surface, and the wind moving the trailing green branches of the trees along the near shore. In
time, he'd hear the nightflyers, too, but they were not yet up.
There were four in the boat, but only Kabaraijian listened or heard. The others, bigger men with
pasty faces and vacant eyes, were long past hearing. They wore the dull gray coveralls of dead men, and
there was a steel plate in the back of each man's skull. Sometimes, when his corpse controller was on,
Kabaraijian could listen with their ears, and see with their eyes. But that was work, hard work, and not
worth it. The sights and sounds a corpse handler felt through his crew were pale echoes of real sensation,
seldom useful and never pleasurable.
And now, Grotto's cooling dusk, was an off-time. So Kabaraijian's corpse controller was off, and his
mind, disengaged from the dead men, rested easy in sits own body. The launch moved purposefully along
the lake shore, but Kabaraijian's thoughts wandered lazily, when he thought at all. Mostly he just sat, and
watched the water and the trees, and listened. He'd worked the corpse crew hard that day, and now he
was drained and empty. ThoughtтАФthought especiallyтАФwas more effort than he was prepared to give.
Better to just linger with the evening.
It was a long, quiet voyage, across two big lakes and one small one, through a cave, and finally up a
narrow and swift-running river. Kabaraijian turned up the power then, and the trip grew noisier as the
launch sliced a path through the river's flow. Night had settled before he reached the station, a rambling
structure of blue-black stone set by the river's edge. But the office windows still glowed with a cheery
yellow light.
A long dock of native silverwood fronted the river, and a dozen launches identical to Kabaraijian's
were already tied up for the night. But there were still empty berths. Kabaraijian took one of them, and
guided the boat into it.
When the launch was secure, he slung his collection box under one arm, and hopped out onto the
dock. His free hand went to his belt, and thumbed the corpse controller. Vague sense blurs drifted into
his mind, but Kabaraijian shunted them aside, and shook the dead men alive with an unheard shout. The
corpses rose, one by one, and stepped out of the launch. Then they followed Kabaraijian to the station.
Munson was waiting inside the officeтАФa fat, scruffy man with gray hair and wrinkles around his eyes
and a fatherly manner. He had his feet up on his desk, and was reading a novel. When Kabaraijian
entered, he smiled and sat up and put down the book, inserting his leather placemark carefully. "'Lo,
Matt," he said. "Why are you always the last one in?"
"Because I'm usually the last one out," Kabaraijian said, smiling. It was his newest line. Munson
asked the same question every night, and always expected Kabaraijian to come up with a fresh answer.
He seemed only moderately pleased by this one.
Kabaraijian set the collection box down on Munson's desk and opened it. "Not a bad day," he said.
"Four good stones, and twelve smaller ones."