"Donald Moffitt - Mechanical Sky 2 - A Gathering of Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moffitt Donald)

A
GATHERING
OF STARS
Book Two of The Mechanical Sky

Donald Moffitt
Copyright ┬й 1989 by Donald Moffitt
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-91891
ISBN 0-34.5-36574-7
Cover Art by Don Dixon
e-book ver. 1.0


Grateful acknowledgment is made to Arthur C. Clarke and his agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency,
Inc., 845 3rd Avenue, New York, NY 10022, for permission to reprint an excerpt from "Space the
Unconquerable" from PROFILES OF THE FUTURE by Ar-thur C. Clarke.

"Try to imagine how the War of Independence would have gone if news of Bunker Hill had not
arrived in England until Disraeli was Victoria's prime minister and his urgent instructions on how to
deal with the situation had reached America during President Eisenhower's second term. Stated in
this way, the whole concept of inter-stellar administration or culture is seen to be an absurdity."
arthur c. clarke




CHAPTER 1

The mullah's knife flashed, and a spurt of arterial blood drenched his white robes. He continued sawing
away at the sheep's throat until he was satisfied, then untangled his fin-gers from the woolly head and let it
drop limply to the plastic sheet that the spaceport janitorial crew had spread to protect the inlaid floor of the
departure lounge.
"Well, you're guaranteed a safe voyage, at any rate," said Hamid-Jones's baby-sitter, an impressively
self-possessed young attach├й from the Centauran embassy. "Are you going to go over there to dip your
fingertips for luck?"
"I don't think so," Hamid-Jones said.
Droplets of blood were hanging in the air, settling impercep-tibly in the almost nonexistent gravity of
Deimos. A couple of members of the maintenance crew were sweeping the air with large sponges to catch
stray drops escaping the tarpaulined area, but one jet of blood had traveled twenty feet, and another
cover-alled worker was hurrying to intercept it with a catch basin.
"Wise decision," said the watchdog. "Your ident's as good as we could make it, but it's best to stay in the
background as much as possible till you're safely aboard Centauran territory."
The mullah was winding up the sacrificial rites with a prayer. A number of passengers were
self-consciously lining up for in-dividual blessings.
 "What about the person whose place I took?" Hamid-Jones asked.
"He'll be sent back down to Mars in the same diplomatic pouch that brought you up, and we'll do a lot of
computer shuf-fles over the next few months to pass along the hiatus till it's diluted enough to be wiped out.
How was the ride? Uncomfort-able?"
"It wasn't too bad."
The "pouch" had, in fact, been a sealed cylinder large enough to stretch out in. An outer shell was filled