"Julian May - Rampart Worlds 3 - Sagittarius Whorl" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by
The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-110291

ISBN 0-345-39518-2

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition: January 2001

10 987654321
 Chapter 1
Behold a comatose human guy in a dystasis tank, hooked to a psychotronic apparatus
that plays the same lovely dream over and over and over. He is being genetically
engineered.
That much he knows, because he's been in one of the damned vats beforeтАФsometime,
somewhere. The details are a mystery. He drifts in the glass coffin of bubbly oxygen-
charged goo, too stoned by the drugs and REMory dream-programming to react
rationally during his brief interludes of semiconsciousness.
The wakeful bits, when he manages to force open his eyes and peer myopically
through the perfluorocarbon liquid, are fuzzy and surreal and punctuated by stabs of fear
and helpless anger. During them, the floater recalls one vivid short-term memory
snippet...
He sits in a smoke-filled bar in a hollow asteroid in the distant Sagittarius Whorl, and
the Haluk smiles at him as his consciousness starts to drain away. He remembers his
despairing certainty, in the final instant before oblivion, that the aliens are probably going
to subject him to something outrageously weird this time around, having failed to finish
him off during their previous assaults and batteries.
He squirms in the dystasis tank, making a futile attempt to swim up, push off the lid,
and break free. But his limbs and trunk are firmly clamped in an upright frame. Only his
head, gripped less tightly, is able to move a little.
He remembers a few more things.
He can swim. He can cook. He can pilot a starship. He can ride a horse.
He's a disgrace. He's a lawyer. He's a scuba diver. He's a zillionaire.
He was a cop. He was a suicidal drunk. He was a political gadfly. He was ... doing
something that got him in deepest shit.
When he finishes wrenching his head around uselessly, he sees another transparent-
walled container next to his own. Inside it another body is dimly visible in reddish womb-
light, a companion in dystasis. Straining, he tries to get a better view of the other person,
but finds it impossible.
His mouth opens in a silent roar of frustration. With his lungs and the rest of his
respiratory tract full of liquid, his vocal cords are as impotent as those of an unborn baby.
The dystasis monitoring equipment detects his frantic muscle contractions and the
hormonal flood that indicates an agitated mental state.