"Sean Williams - Saturn Returns" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Sean)

won't fall into place." He kicked out suddenly, flailing his legs in an
ill-advised attempt to swing out of his bunk and into the chamber beyond,
there to stand and seek out his questioner, the voice known only through a
speaker thus far, buzzing and removed.
Nausea overwhelmed him before he came close to succeeding. A flock of
memories, beating at his mind like a storm of crows, drove him back into the
bunk.
"I don't know," he moaned into the speaker. "I don't know who I am."
"You said your name is Imre Bergamasc. Isn't that who you are?"
"I suppose it must be. It has to be." He placed both hands over his eyes and
felt cool wetness on his cheeks. "Who is Imre Bergamasc? Do you know who he's
supposed to be? I don't know, and I don't know how to find out."
"Are you saying now that you're not Imre Bergamasc?" The speaker sounded
puzzled and cautiousтАФperhaps, even, oddly fearful. "That's my name," he said,
"so I must be. Right?"
The speaker fell silent. Imre wept softly to himself, seeing no way out of
the terrible conundrum. He knew his name but didn't know who he was.
Something in his mind wasn't working correcdy. The uncertainty cut like acid
deep into his thoughts. He couldn't think through that terrible block, now
that he had confronted it. He was stuck, frozen, damaged.
A door in the chamber outside his bunk hissed open. Air shifted minutely as
pressures equalized. He wiped his face and blinked his sight clear of tears.
A hunched, monklike figure had entered the room.
"We, the Jinc, will explain," it said, coming to his side. Its voice was the
same as the one before: diin and dusted with static. The speaker had been
working perfectly. "Please let us."
He looked up into a face that seemed composed of nothing but gristle and grey
skin, as animated as a corpse. Its eyes were shut, but its hands moved with
all the purpose and certainty of the sighted. He reflexively recoiled when it
reached for him with long, flexing fingers, but again he reined in that
instinct. The Noh was a group mind distributed through the skulls of numerous
willing hosts. The creature before him had no more individual will than his
own foot, being the instrument through which the gestalt mind acted. It was a
mouthpiece, not the mouth.
He nodded to his strange host and let himself be eased out of the bunk.
The Noh vessel was cramped and torturous to navigate! Corridors little wider
than the bunk in which he had woken snaked between sepulchral chambers that
doubled or tripled functions in order to utilize the volumes they occupied
with maximum efficiency. The room in which he had woken was, it transpired,
normally reserved for medicinal purposes as well as bunking space for the
mouthpieces roughly equating to doctors or nurses within the Jinc. The
dispersed entityтАФ who took its name as a parenthesis around a single parcel of
the greater culture or creature known as the NohтАФneeded such functionaries
just as an individual human needed an immune system. When components fell
ill, repair was easier than replacement. Voyages through deep space demanded
such careful use of resources, since the next stop might be hundreds of years
Absolute away.
Imre could not have retraced the route he followed through the Jinc's vessel.
He hoped he would not need to. Along the way he noted clues as to the
physical nature of the ship: a spinning habitat providing centripetal gravity