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

name which was also his half brother's nameЧthe name
of Kerrion space's presiding consul general, who had
banished him here?

"Let us slate it into the record," she proposed, eyeing
the scrambler, suspicious of him because he employed it.

When he had folded up the scrambler, they repeated
their agreement, Shebat saying first, "Slate" and after-
ward, "End, slate."

Five thousand miles above their heads, the worried
spongespace cruiser Marada, empty but ever watchful,
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. ChaeronЧseeing 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 glowedЧshivered,
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 comeЧwhen 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