"Andrew J. Offutt - Spaceways 02 - Corundums Woman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

will accommodate without overlapping more than a few of the holes. They may
vary in size and distance from each other. Now set a light behind the
Blackness. 10 You have created a representation of space. A simulacrum of
the galaxy. If the holes are closer together in toward the center, all the
better. Stars are clustered thick there, thick as flowers of white and yellow
and red and blue in an untrodden meadow. The pinholes are not pinholes. They
are stars. Hundreds of millions of stars. They form a fraction of that part of
the universe called the Milky Way galaxy. A ridiculous name! Herakles a.k.a.
Hercules, the Greeks claimed, once jerked his infant mouth from his wet
nurse's breast with such force that the night sky was spattered with droplets
of milk! Lactose and lactation; ga-lactic and galaxy; milk and the Milky Way.
The Greek gala and the Latin lac: both mean "milk." That is the panorama. That
is one galaxy in a universe of galaxies. Now adjust the zoom lens and note
that one of the pinholes is not stationary. One of the pinholes is moving. It
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is not a pinhole or a spot of milk or a star. It is a made Thing, a vessel
made by men and women: a craft. It is a ship to sail the limitless ocean of
milk-spattered black. It is a spaceship, racing. The men and women now call
themselves Galactics. They sail the star-splashed ocean of black and indigo
that is the galaxy. In the spaceship are Galactics and they and their created
Things have detected another star that is not a star. It is not moving toward
them, which would be useless at their velocity. It is racing to intersect
their course. It will, too, since its velocity is greater than theirs. They
know interest mingled with some fear which becomes fear and dread. It is too
late. Their craft is slow and the other is swift. In the ocean of space, they
are a meandering but tasty fish, stalked by a shark. It races to intersect
their course. It intersects. Now it is horribly near, in space, where nothing
is close. Its human-created Things grapple the two craft 11 together in
the manner of an ancient pirate vessel on, for example, the Caribbean Sea of
what was once called "Earth." It is a shark. The two ships are locked
together. Captain Harry Morgan, model for Captain Blood and others, used steel
grapnels. They were curved and clawed multiple hooks at the ends of long rope
or chain. They bit into wooden hulls and were tugged taut to bring the ships
together, and hold them so. That was in the seventeenth century, and that was
hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Centuries upon centuries later, Captain
Corundum uses a directed electromagnetic field called a "tractor field." The
target ship does not stop. It continues rushing through space. So does its new
dark companion, Fire-dancer. The harpooned whale is not dragging the boat;
both are whales and one accompanies the other. The velocities are matched,
whale and killer whale. No human helmsman or navigator or astrogator on
Fire-dancer does this, because none could. A human-created Thing does. It is a
Ship Inboard Processing and Computing Unit (Modular) and is called SIPACUM. On
Firedancer, it is called "Jinni," a form of djinni or genie. It also aids its
captain's voice to travel from his ship into the other, where it crackles
crisply in via the comm system of the . . . prey. "Hail, merchantship. We are
grappled to you. You have a choice. Accept us on board, losing your cargo but
keeping your lives and your ship, or refuse and resist. In that event we shall