"Sheri S. Tepper - Shadow's End" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

"Stellar collapse?"

"The usual cause of rogue emergences is stellar collapse. The dimensional field twitches, so to speak.
Things get sucked in here and spat out there. Well, the crew was brought here, and more questions were
asked. It turned out they'd picked up equipment from four worlds in the sector and had noticed nothing
at all inimical. We sent volunteer expeditions to investigate. All of them returned shrugging their shoulders
and shaking their heads. Nothing. No sign of what had happened to the human population thirty-odd
years before, and no signs of aliens at all. We assumed the Ularians, whatever they or it had been, had
departed."

"So there were no survivors?" mused Lutha.

He shook his head. "Oh, we looked, believe me! We had no information about Ularians, no description
of them, no actual proof that they existed, which gratified the Firster godmongers, you may be sure, for
they'd claimed from the beginning there were no such things as Ularians. Since government is always
delicately poised vis-a-vis godmongers, we were extremely interested in what survivors might tell us, but
we never found a thing in Hermes Sector. Oh, there were some children who turned up on Perdur Alas
around twenty years ago, but they were probably emergence castaways also."

"Unlikely they'd have been there for eighty years. They'd have had to be third or fourth generation."

"Quite right. All this is mere diversion, however."

"You started by asking me about Bernesohn Famber," she said impatiently.

"Therelevant fact is that Bernesohn Famber was on one of the ships that went into Hermes Sector right
after the vanishments."

"One of the lost ships."

"No! One that came back. Bernesohn was erratic and secretive. A genius, no doubt, but odd.
Sometimes he didn't appear outside his quarters for days and days. His colleagues didn't expect to see
him regularly, so they didn't realize he was gone! When the ship got back here, they didn't have any idea
where or when he'd gone. We couldn't find him."

The Procurator leaned back in his chair. "Imagine our discomfiture sometime later when we learned he
was living on Dinadh."

"How did you find that out?" Lutha asked.

"Well, a year or so after Bernesohn disappeared, Tospia, his longtime companion, gave womb-birth to
twins. In Fastiga."

Lutha knew where Fastiga was. It might be called a suburb of Prime. Leelson's mother lived there.

The Procurator went on. "Tospia's twins were entered in the Famber lineage roster, but nobody at Prime
made the connection."

She said impatiently, "You intend to make the point, I presume, that the twins were conceived after
Bernesohn's disappearance?"