"Jack Vance - Tschai 4 - The Pnume" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

"See him smirk!" hissed Anacho. "If he could he'd boil us in nerve-fire! Kill



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him now!"
Reith made another sound of moderation. "In a week we'll be gone. What can he
do, chained and helpless?"
"He is Woudiver!"
"Even so, we can't slaughter him like an animal."
Anacho threw up his hands and followed Traz outside the warehouse. Reith went
into the ship and for a few minutes watched the technicians. They worked at the
exquisitely delicate job of balancing the power pumps. Reith could offer no
assistance. Dirdir technology, like the Dirdir psyche, was beyond his
comprehension. Both derived from intuitive certainties, or so he suspected;
there was little evidence of purposeful rationality in any aspect of Dirdir
existence.
Long shafts of brown light slanted through the high windows; the time was
almost sunset. Woudiver thoughtfully put aside his fancy-work. He gave Reith a
companionable nod and went off to his little room against the wall, the chain
dragging behind him in a rattling halfcatenary.
The technicians emerged from the ship as did Fio Haro the master mechanic.
All went off to their supper. Reith touched the unlovely hull, pressing his
hands against the steel, as if he could not credit its reality. A week-then
space and return to Earth! The prospect seemed a dream; Earth had become the
world remote and bizarre.
Reith went to the larder for a chunk of black sausage, which he took to the
doorway. Carina 4269, low in the sky, bathed the salt flats in ale colored
light, projecting long shadows behind every tussock.
The two black figures which of late had appeared at sunset were nowhere to be
seen.
The view held a certain mournful beauty. To the north the city of Sivishe was
a crumble of old masonry tinted tawny by the slanting sunlight. West across
Ajzan Sound stood the spires of the Dirdir city Hei and, looming above all, the
Glass Box.
Reith went to join Traz and Anacho. They sat on a bench tossing pebbles into
a puddle: Traz, blunted-featured, taciturn, solid of bone and muscle, Anacho,
thin as an eel, six inches taller than Reith, pallid of skin, long and keen of
feature, as loquacious as Traz was terse. Traz disapproved of Anacho's airs;
Anacho considered Traz crass and undiscriminating. Occasionally, however, they
agreed-as now, on the need to destroy Aila Woudiver. Reith, for his own part,
felt more concern for the Dirdir. From their spires they could almost look
through the portals of the warehouse at the work within. The Dirdir inactivity
seemed as unnatural as Aila Woudiver's smile, and to Reith implied a dreadful
stealth.
"Why don't they do something?" Reith complained, gnawing at the black
sausage. "They must know we're here."
"Impossible to predict Dirdir conduct," Anacho replied. "They have lost