"Andre Norton - Dark Companion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

DARK PIPER
ONE
I have heard it stated that a Zexro tape will last forever. But even a second generation now may find
nothing worth treasuring in our story. Of our own company, Dinan, and perhaps Gytha, who now work
on the storage of all the old off-world records may continue to keep such a history of our times. But we
do not run our reader now except for a pressing need for technical information, since no one knows how
long its power pack will last. Therefore, this tape may keep its message locked for a long time unless,
ages from now, those off-world do remember our colony and come seeking to learn its fate, or unless
there shall arise here people able to rebuild machines that have died for want of proper repairs.

My recording may thus be of no benefit, for in three years our small company has taken a great
backward leap from civilized living to barbarism. Yet I spend an hour each evening on it, having taken
notes with the aid of all, for even young minds have impressions to add. This is the tale of the Dark Piper,
Griss Lugard, who saved a handful of his kind, so that those who walk as true men should not totally
vanish from a world he loved. Yet we who owe him our lives know so little about him that what we must
in truth set upon this tape are our own deeds and actions and the manner of his passing.

Beltane was unique among the Scorpio Sector planets in that it was never intended for general
settlement, but instead was set up as a biological experimental station. By some freak of nature, it had a
climate acceptable to our species, but there was no intelligent native life, nor, indeed, any life very high in
scale. Its richly vegetated continents numbered two, with wide seas spaced between. The eastern one
was left to what native life there was. The Reserves and the hamlets and farms of the experimental staffs
were all placed upon the western one, radiating out from a single spaceport.

As a functioning unit in the Confederation scheme, Beltane had been in existence about a century at the
outbreak of the Four Sectors War. That war lasted ten planet years.

Lugard said it was the beginning of the end for our kind and their rulership of the space lanes. There can
rise empires of stars, and confederations, and other governments. But there comes a time when such
grow too large or too old, or are rent from within. Then they collapse as will a balloon leaf when you
prick it with a thorn, and all that remains is a withered wisp of stuff. Yet those on Beltane welcomed the
news of the end of the war with a hope of new beginning, of return to that golden age of "before the war"
on which the newest generation had been raised with legendary tales. Perhaps the older settlers felt the
chill of truth, but they turned from it as a man will seek shelter from the full blast of a winter gale. Not to
look beyond the next corner will sometimes keep heart in a man.

Since the population of Beltane was small, most of them specialists and members of such families, it had
been drained of manpower by the services, and of the hundreds who were so drafted, only a handful
returned. My father did not.
 We Collises were First Ship family, but unlike most, my grandfather had been no techneer, nor
bio-master, but had commanded the Security force. Thus, from the beginning, our family was, in a small
measure, set apart from the rest of the community, though there was nothing but a disparity of interests to
make that so. My father lacked ambition perhaps. He went off-world and passed in due course through
Patrol training. But he did not elect to try for promotion. Instead, he opted to return to Beltane, assuming,
in time, command of the Security force here that his father had commanded. Only the outbreak of the
war, which caused a quick call-up of all available trained men, pulled him away from the roots he
desired.

I would have undoubtedly followed his example, save that those ten years of conflict wherein we were
more or less divorced from space kept me at home. My mother, who had been of a techneer family, died