"Donald Moffitt - Mechanical Sky 1 - Crescent in the Sky" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moffitt Donald)

It was a great opportunity, but not without its perils. One of Hamid-Jones's predecessors in the job had
come to the Emir's personal attentionтАФunfavorablyтАФand the story was still told in whispers of how he had
been fed alive to the Royal Aviary. Of course the circumstances were hardly comparable; the unfortu-nate
cloning assistant had been guilty not of mere failure, but of stealing sequestered genetic material and selling
it to mem-bers of the minor aristocracy anxious to improve the breeding of their hunting dogs. But
salukisтАФthe Noble OnesтАФwere a royal prerogative. They could never be sold, only exchanged or given as
giftsтАФand that went for their DNA, too. Still, stealing genetic material of treasured animals was a
time-honored cus-tom, and it was usually the servants who were caught. Even in the time of the Prophet
more than two millennia before, enter-prising desert sheiks had schemed to purloin the semen of prize
stallions and race it across the sands to waiting mares. That was how the Arabian breed had spread.
Nowadays it was done by contraband nucleotides.
It took Hamid-Jones an hour of patient work to put together another plasmid carrying the passenger gene
and to tease out an undamaged six-foot strand of the Winged One's DNA from the precious hoard the
Clonemaster had entrusted him with. An enucleated egg had already been summoned from the files and
was on standby. Now he was ready to prepare the cleavage sites. He was just about to set the computer to
do a search of base pair sequences on the long molecule when he became aware of a growing hum of
voices in the main dome outside his cubicle. Doors slammed. There was a gregarious babble, almost like a
Thursday night. A chattering group hurried past his door, and he could distinguish calls of "Allah isalmak"
and "Take care." It sounded as if the laboratory was emptying out, but it was still a couple of hours till
quitting time.
Rashid poked his head inside the door with a big grin. Beyond him, Hamid-Jones could see two of his
friends, Ja'far and Fei-sel, looking flushed and excited.
"Why are you still hanging around?" Rashid demanded. "We're being let off early."
"Huh? What are you talking about?"
"A holiday's been declared," Feisel supplied, leaning in past Rashid's shoulder. "Three whole days, starting
at sunset. There'll be public feasts and everything. Old Yezid Bent-Stick came round himself to pass the
word. Yallah, come on, the place is closed."
"But we've just celebrated Iid al-Fitr. And the Feast of the Sacrifice is still two months off."
"It's a new holiday, I tell you," Feisel said impatiently. "It's been declared by the Vizier at the orders of the
Emir himself."
Hamid-Jones scratched his head. "Why? What's it for?"
"Haven't you heard? The Emir is having himself beheaded again."


The passageways were crowded with people milling about looking for something to do or hurrying home
early to make holiday preparations. A few scruffy vendors and street enter-tainers were already circulating
to get a head start on the pleasure-seeking throngs that could be expected later as the cel-ebrations
gathered steam; Hamid-Jones at one point had to squeeze past a clot of idlers who had collected around a
juggling act, completely blocking the intersection of the Tharsis North and Gazelle Lane tunnels. There was
not a tricab to be had when he emerged from the transit tube, and he was resigned to walk-ing the rest of
the way home.
He had tried to stay on at the darkened lab until he could finish the annealing job and get the altered
nucleus safely into the egg, but Yezid had come around with his jangling key ring and kicked him out. Now
another clone had been spoiled, and Hamid-Jones was going to have to screw up enough courage to ask the
Clonemaster for more specimens from the Winged One after the three-day holiday was over.
He dodged past some workmen who were stringing colored lights across the main concourse and ducked
into the maze of narrow, winding tunnels that led to the Old City, the Medina al-Kadima. Here the
warrens of closetlike shops that lined the walls had been hacked out of the rock of Mars itself, and
gen-erations of owners had been adding illegally to their property by excavating the long alcoves inch by
inch at the rear; sections of tunnel had been known to collapse when the burrowers went too far and met