"May, Julian - Galactic Milieu 3 - Magnificat" - читать интересную книгу автора (May Julian)

"Gotta go into that a tad more thoroughly," he said to himself. "C'est que'q'chose--what a bizarre pair of saints they were! Little Diamond Mask and Jack the Bodiless." He thought about them, smiling as his eyes roved over the final page.
But his reverie evaporated as he reached the last line. He was suddenly wide awake with something horrid stirring deep in his gut.
"No, goddammit! I can't get away with a happy ending. I'm supposed to be telling the whole truth about our family." He grabbed the mike, barked out a concluding sentence, then reprinted the page and read what he had produced.
Pain tightened Rogi's face. He slammed the durofilm sheet down on the desk, mouthed an obscenity in Canuckois dialect, and sat with his head lowered for a moment before looking up toward the ceiling. "And you say you didn't have any idea who Fury was, mon fantЇme?"
Marcel the cat flinched, skinning his ears back, but he held his ground. Rogi wasn't talking to him and he was used to his master's eccentric soliloquies.
"You really didn't know the monster's identity?" the old man bellowed furiously at the empty air. "Well, why the hell not? You Lylmik are supposed to be the almighty Overlords of the Galactic Milieu, aren't you? If you didn't know, it's because you deliberately chose not to!"
There was silence, except for the dawn chorus of the birds.
Muttering under his breath, Rogi pulled a key ring from his pants pocket and lurched to his feet. A gleaming fob resembling a small ball of red glass enclosed in a metal cage caught the light from the desk lamp as he shook the bunch of old-fashioned keys provocatively.
"Talk to me, Ghost! Answer the questions. If you want me to finish up these memoirs, you better get your invisible ass down to Earth and start explaining why you didn't prevent all that bad shit! Not just the Fury thing, but the Mental Man fiasco and the war as well. Why did you let it happen? God knows you meddled and manipulated us enough earlier in the game."
The Family Ghost remained silent.
Rogi crumpled back into the chair and pressed his brow with the knuckles of his tightened fists. The cat jumped lightly into his lap and butted his head against his master's chest.
Go home, Marcel said.
"Le fantЇme familier won't talk to me," the old man remarked sadly. He tugged at the cat's soft ears and scratched his chin. Marcel began to purr. Rogi's brief spate of wakefulness was fading and he felt an overwhelming fatigue. "The Great Carbuncle always rousted the bastard out before. What the hell's the matter with him? He hasn't been around prompting me in weeks."
He's busy, said a voice in his mind. An' not feelin' so good. He come back laytah an' kokua when you really need 'im.
"Who's that?" Rogi croaked, starting up from the chair.
It's me, brah. Malama. I got da word from yo' Lylmik spook eh? Somet'ing you gotta do fo' you go mainland.
"Oh, shit. Haven't I had enough grief--"
Hanakokolele Rogue! Try trust yo' akamai tutu. Dis gonna be plenny good fo' da kine memoirs. Firs' t'ing yo' catch some moemoe den egg on ovah my place. Da Mo'i Lylmik wen send special visitors. It say dey gone clarity few t'ings li' dat fo' yo' write summore.
"Who the hell are these visitors?"
Come down in aftanoon fine out Now sleep. Aloha oe mo'opuna.
"Malama?... Malama?" Rogi spoke a last feeble epithet. Why was his Hawaiian friend being so damned mysterious? What was the Family Ghost up to now, using the kahuna woman as a go-between?
Sleep, urged Marcel. He jumped down from the desk and headed out of the room, pausing to look back over his shoulder.
"Ah, bon, bon," the old man growled in surrender.
Outside, the sky had turned to gold and wild roosters were crowing in the ravines. Rogi turned off the desk lamp and the transcriber and shuffled after the cat. The key ring with the Great Carbuncle, forgotten, lay on the desk looking very ordinary except for a wan spark of light at the heart of the red fob, reminiscent of a similar, more sinister object buried in Spain.

Rogi slept poorly, plagued by dreams of the Fury monster and its homicidal minion, Hydra. Roused by the pillow alarm at 1400 hours, he slapped shave on his face, showered, put on fresh slacks and a more subdued shirt, and went out to the egg parked on the landing pad at the edge of the garden.
Tony Opelu was trimming a hibiscus hedge with a brushzapper. He waved. "Howzit, Rogi! Goin' to town? Try bring back couple E-cells fo' da Jeep, eh? She wen die on me this mornin'."
"No trouble at all."
"T'anks, eh? Howza book goin'?"
"Just finished the chunk I was working on. I'll be taking off for the mainland tomorrow, leave you and Haunani in peace. It's been a real pleasure being here, but I've got a hankering for home."
"It happens," Tony conceded.
"I'll leave a note for Elaine. Give her my best when you see her again." Rogi climbed into the ovoid rhocraft, lit up, and lofted slowly into the air under inertialess power.
Rainclouds shrouded the uplands, but the lower slopes of Kauai were in full sunlight. He flew across Waimea Canyon, a spectacular gash in the land that Mark Twain had compared to a miniaturized version of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Beyond were dark lava cliffs, gullies carved in scarlet laterite soil, and lush green ridges with glittering streams and the occasional waterfall. He flew on manual, heading southeast, descending over lowland jungles that had once been flourishing cane fields. Some sugar was still grown on the island, but most of the local people now earned a living catering to tourists. There were also colonies of artists and writers on Kauai, enclaves of retired folks who scorned rejuvenation and intended to die in a paradisiacal setting, two cooperatives dedicated to the preservation of island culture that staged immersive pageants, and a few metapsychic practitioners who specialized in the huna "magic" of ancient Polynesia.
Malama Johnson was one of those.
Her picturesque house, deceptively modest on the outside, was in Kukuiula Bay, a few kilometers west of the resort town of Poipu, not far from the place where Jon Remillard and Dorothea Macdonald had resided when they were on Earth. There were no other eggs on the pad behind Malama's place, but a sporty green Lotus groundcar with a discreet National logo on the windscreen was parked in the shade of a silk oak tree next to her elderly Toyota pickup.
Rogi disembarked from his rhocraft and tried farsensing the interior of the house. But Malama had put up an opaque barrier to such spying, and his mind's ear heard her scolding him in the Pidgin dialect that Hawaiians loved to use among their intimates:
Wassamatta you peephead? Fo'get all yo' mannahs o' wot? E komo mai wikiwiki!
With a shamefaced grin, he knocked on the rear screen door and came into the empty kitchen. "Aloha, tutu!"
Malama Johnson called out in perfectly modulated Standard English. "We're in the lanai, Rogi. Come join us."
He passed through the cool, beautifully appointed rooms to the shaded porch at the other end of the house. It was dim and fragrant, with a fine view of the sea. The stout kahuna woman bounced up and embraced him, kissing him on both cheeks. She wore a royal blue muumuu and several leis of rare tiny golden shells from Niihau. "Cloud and Hagen flew in last night from San Francisco," she said, indicating the two guests.
Rogi swallowed his astonishment. "Hey. Nice to see you again."
The fair-haired young man and woman nodded at him but remained seated in their rattan chairs, sipping from tall tumblers of iced fruit juice. They were immaculately attired, she in a snowy cotton safari suit and high white buckskin moccasins, he in a white Lacoste shirt, white slacks, and white Top-Siders. Rogi knew the visitors, all right, but no better than any other members of the Remillard family did. They were still very reclusive and reticent about their early lives. Their presence here on Kauai under these peculiar circumstances came as a considerable shock to the old man.
He took a seat at Malama's urging. On the low koawood table was a tray holding an untouched dish of pupus--Hawaiian snacks--and two beverage pitchers, one half-empty and one that was full. Pouring from the latter, the kahuna offered a glass to Rogi. The drink had a sizable percentage of rum and he gulped it thankfully as he eyed the young people. They were in their early thirties. A remote smile touched the lips of Cloud Remillard as she looked out at the sea. Her brother Hagen was blank-faced, making no pretense of cordiality.
Rogi ventured an awkward attempt at heartiness. "So the Family Ghost put the arm on you two kids to collaborate in the memoirs, eh?"
Hagen Remillard's reply was chill and formal, and every aspect of his mind was inviolably shielded. "We were bespoken by a Lylmik wearing the usual disembodied head manifestation. He ordered us to come here and talk to you about certain events that took place during our exile in the Pliocene Epoch."
"That... should be mighty interesting." Rogi's grin was wary.
"You know that our entire group was debriefed by the Human Polity Science Directorate when we first came through the time-gate." Hagen did not meet the old bookseller's eyes. "At that time we were instructed not to publicize details of our Pliocene experiences, and we complied scrupulously. Even now, very few people know that the two of us were among the returnees."
"It was a relief, having an official excuse to keep quiet about our identities," Cloud said. "We knew that if the public were spared the more gaudy details of our prehistoric adventures, there would be less likelihood of our lives becoming a media circus. In most of the Milieu, our group was just a nine days' wonder. You know: Time-Travelers Return! Whoop-dee-doo... then on to the next bit of fast-breaking news. My husband, Kuhal, had a harder time of it, but at least he's humanoid and so he adapted. We've been kept busy doing certain work connected with our conditional Unification and we've managed to live more or less in peace-- until now."
Hagen said, "The entity who countermanded the Directorate's gag order told us that he was Atoning Unifex, the head of the Milieu's Supervisory Body. Cloud and I were properly overawed at first. But as the Lylmik spoke to us we both experienced a shocking sense of dщjр vu. After Unifex vanished we were confused--no, we were terrified!--and we wondered if we had experienced some shared delusion, a waking nightmare. Not long afterward, the Lylmik's orders to us were reconfirmed by the First Magnate of the Human Polity and also by the Intendant General of Earth. Both women took some pains to tell us what an extraordinary communication we'd been honored with." The young man's face was sardonic. "That was a considerable understatement."
"We agreed to come here and talk to you only after it became evident that we would be coerced if we refused," Cloud added. Her voice was low-pitched, but warm and without rancor. "We've had quite enough of that already in our lives."