"Janet Morris - Kerrion Empire 03 - Earth Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morris Janet E)

made a record of the pact between his pilot/owner Shebat
and her husband, who for a time had used a scrambler to
defeat the cruiser's benign surveillance. The Marada had
not been able to dissuade Shebat from coming here, as
he had not been able to prevent her from going
groundside, alone, where even his prodigious abilities of-
fered his beloved pilot little protection. Twenty thousand
additional miles distant, Chaeron's orbital data pool
made its own entry, neither concerned nor comprehend-
ing. The reaffirmation of their bond thus slated into legal
being, both humans let their mind-actuated links with
their sources lapse, sure that should they need them fur-
ther, only a subvocalized code was necessary to connect
them again with mechanical intelligence, as men through-
out the universe used this attunement of mind to com-
puter to extend their rule over a multitude of stars.

Then, as neither had wanted, they found themselves
staring, wordless, at one another. ChaeronтАФseeing a
gaze come over Shebat that was infernally intelligent and
somehow inward, full of cruisers and her illusion of magi-
cal powers so that she seemed to grow tall and numinous

EARTH DREAMS 5

and from her eyes reflected firelight glowedтАФshivered,
thinking: /'// never manage to get through this without a
quarrel, without worse than that, what with her hatred for
my pilot and her dreams for Earth I can never make true.
If only my father hadn't given her that cruiser ... /or
good reason is it said that all pilots are mad.

And Shebat, returning his stare in kind, wondered
when it would comeтАФwhen he would deride her enchant-
ments and sneer at her primitive origins, while seeking to
see if any star-bom superciliousnsss yet rested in his
eyes, which could not have failed to mark the disarray
into which her homeworld had fallen. And she sought
any trace of guilt there, for she was sure he felt none
over the fact that his mother and half brother had con-
spired to murder Shebat's instructor in the arts of pilo-
tryтАФher "master," David Spry; the first thing she had
done when he had come striding into her cave all Kerrion
and arrogant was tell him that cruisers' intelligence ac-
cused his mother of Spry's murder, and he had betrayed
no surprise. If what she feared was so, and he had
known, or even suspected, she could never, ever forgive
himтАФnever lie with him again. And she would have to
guess eternally at the truth of it, for Chaeron was past-
master of duplicity, and canny enough to know how she