"Andrew J. Offutt - Spaceways 09 - In Quest of Qalara" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

there was no way to manage women's waste." "On the far lower right hand corner
of a living room wall," the wise-looking computer program told Janja of
Aglaya, "make a firm thumbprint and draw a circle around it. Call that
Thebanis, only planet of the double star Janski. Basing distance on the same
scale as Thebanis's size on the wall, take five paces to its left and, on
tiptoe, make another thumbprint. Circle that and call it Jorinne, fourth
planet of the double star Payne." The program blinked at her from the screen
and quirked his mouth into an expression that was not quite a smile. "Now you
have some concept of the size of just this central area of our galaxy, and the
distance between its suns and their planets." Janja nodded, sighing. She
understood-in a way. It didn't seem so, whizzing along in a spaceship
that 37 could also slip into that nonentity called "subspace" purely for the
sake of convenience, mental and linguistic- and cover distance even faster
than whizzing. Hard enough to accept that the person she was looking at was
not a person at all, but had been and was dead, and was now wholly an
electronic simulation. "Time is a distance," it/he said, "and distance must be
measured by time. This remains so even with our ability to convert into
tachyons and travel faster than light, seemingly in contravention of the
ancient al-Einstein postulation and yet entirely in accord with it-when we
include the few little adjustments made in arriving at the Grand Unified
Theory. Time is a distance, and distance is vast, because the galaxy is
vast." "Yes, yes," Janja said, impatiently drumming her fingers. "My question
concerned Qalara, not catch-phrases and GUT and al-Einstein." The highly
sophisticated computer readjusted and responded without so much as a blip or a
pause. "Return to the representation of Thebanis at the far lower rightward
corner of the wall of a good-sized living room. There is not space enough on
the wall to show Qalara as well as Thebanis. Both would have to be reduced to
mere dots." "Damn," Janja muttered uncharacteristically. "I knew it, but damn
anyhow. It's been a year now. Will I never reach Qalara? I have gone from
ignorant 'barbarian' and slave to captain of my own ship in a year-ess. Must I
wait a lifetime to find Jonuta?" Presumably recognizing a rhetorical question
when it "heard" one, the computer made no reply. Janja stared at the waiting
image and its carefully designed friendly, receptive face. She wore no such
expression. She had never lost sight of her goal since her kidnap off her
idyllic, non-technological and pre-industrial planet, Aglaya. The kidnappers
were Captain Jonuta's men. Slav- 38 ers, off the slaver Jonuta's slaver-ship.
One of them had murdered her lover and affianced, Tarkij, without necessity.
She had been sold-by Jonuta-and had suffered and fought and killed and tricked
her way to freedom, and had been tricked by Corundum, and had joined Hellfire
almost on a whim, and with Hellfire she had been enslaved again, on
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Knor. Still she knew that she was no slave and still she did not feel truly a
part of this culture. Their culture, these arrogant colonizers and enslavers
she called them because they were not her people, these Thingmakers. They were
humans who arrogantly called themselves Galactics, the race of the galaxy, as
if they were alone in it or other races were of no importance. They looked
upon Jarps and Aglayans and others as inferior peoples and enslaved