"Williamson, Jack - 02 - The Humanoid Touch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

The tubeway car ran so fast he had no time to eat the rock- nut cookies. He was too excited to be hungry, anyhow. If the school trained people for service in the Zone, he would be learning what he wanted to know about the dangers and wonders of Malili.

The name "Greenpeak" struck him as a sad little joke when he came to know the school, because nothing green had ever grown within many hundred kilometers. It was in the upper levels of old Mansfort, the tunnel city the first colonists had dug at the unlucky spot where they landed. Bombed twice in the Black Centuries and finally abandoned, the old city had lain empty and dead for six hundred years before the school moved in. Even in the long summer suntimes, snow still banked the black granite peaks around it.

The first night there, he cried in his berth. The crumbling tunnels were dank and gloomy, blocked all around the school with barriers and signs to keep people out of the uncleared areas. His stiff new boots had worn blisters on his toes, and his scratchy new uniform felt too thin. He had taken too long to get it on and missed his turn at mess. He'd been scolded for breaking rules he hadn't known about, had walked a long tour on the duty deck for offering the watch officer a rocknut cookie, because swabbers were new students, not allowed extra-quota sweets.

The next day wasn't quite so bad, after he had met Chelni Vorn. She had been walking the duty deck too, because she hadn't known swabbers weren't allowed to talk in the corridors. Her short upper lip turned white and her square chin quivered when she told him about it.

They hadn't gone with her father to the Dragon because her mother wouldn't leave Northdyke. Her mother didn't want her now, and she had stayed with her uncle before she came to Greenpeak. He told her a little about his father and Cyra. Her chin quivered again when she said she didn't know what had happened to her father and his starship, and suddenly they were friends.

Topman Taiko was a short, stout man, red-faced and squeaky-voiced, without much time for bewildered swabbers. Though he wore a ship-service medal, he had never been anywhere off Kai. Later, Keth came to see him as a troubled, lonely man who loved the school and lived for it, but at first he always seemed angry over nothing.

"I warn you now," he screeched at the swabber class, "you've got a lot to learn. A thousand years of history first, and the great traditions of the ship. You'll learn the list of Na-varchs, from the great Kyrondath Kyrone down to Suan Ko. You'll learn to lead, but not till after you've learned to obey. You'll begin to learn the skills that can take you into space, maybe even out to Malili. But first you'll learn to love Greenpeak."

He stopped to glare down at them and shook his head as if they saddened him.

"You swabbers are a sorry lot, but we'll have to make you do." His fat chin jutted at them, and his old voice quavered. "You're all raw clay, but we'll make you boatfolk, fit to work the ship. You'll have to take some grinding and some blending and some shaping and some heat. Some of you won't like it. Some of you may crack in the kiln. But we'll make the best of you fit for service in the Zone."

Scowling down with dull, red eyes, he talked a long time about rules and punishments. They would walk the duty deck two hours for each black slash. Boatfolk with ten black slashes would get no sweets for the rest of the term. Boatfolk with forty black slashes would never make shipclass.

Keth worked hard. So did Chelni Vorn. They often sat together at mess and she told him more about her family. Her great-grandfather had commanded one of the landers that opened the original Zone and his claims had been the richest hi thorium. His heirs had made the Vorn Voyagers a great trading fleet. She was planning to tram for space, and she hoped one day to command the Vorn station hi the Zone.

She didn't believe in the humanoids.

"Not on Malili, anyhow. My uncle says the Lifecrew makes up horror tales about the planet, about humanoids and killer trees, trying to keep us scared away. We've got real troubles enough, he says, with dragon bats and rockrust and bloodrot, without inventing more. But he says we Vorns are going to open up MaliliЧin spite of everything!"

Sometimes he didn't like her. She talked too much about the Vorn Voyagers, about her uncle's summer places at both capitals, about skiing at his winter lodges and swimming in Crater Lake and hunting wild mutoxen on the Darkside ranch. Most of the other swabbers called her conceited and bossy, but she didn't seem to care. She liked him.

Once she wanted to see him naked. She looked in a head to make sure it was empty, and called him inside. They stripped together. Her body was thin and straight, pale where her uniform had covered it, with no hair anywhere. Frowning at his penis, she said it didn't look good for much.

Dutymate Luan burst in while they were dressing, screaming at them. She dragged them by the ears to Topman Taiko, who gave them an angry lecture and five black slashes each. He hated Chelni while he was walking the tours, but she gave him a secret smile when they met later in the study cabin, and they stayed friends.

Sometimes they studied together and traded tutor tapes. She told him about her holiday trips away to her uncle's exciting places, and she was generous with the illegal extra-quota sweets she always brought back. But she always called the humanoids a stupid hoax.

The school museum had three ruby-colored dragon's eggs in a dusty case, along with a holostat of the ice-caves where they had been found. Looking at them, he felt a pang of old regret for the one his father had taken, and wondered if Chelni still thought they were lucky. He decided not to ask her.

She seldom spoke about her missing father, and no more news came back from the Dragon. Once every moontime, the space transports brought him a voicecard from Malili, but there was never anything about humanoids or those rhodo sources in the jungle. Cyra and his father were busy and well. His father always asked about slash marks and grades, and he always finished: "Remember, Skipper. Learn to fight."

He wasn't learning to fight. Contact sports were worse than chess. He felt secretly relieved when Topman Taiko said he wasn't fit for warball. Once, on the duty deck, when the boxing champ called him yellow, he just walked away. Yet he longed to be ready when the humanoids came.

Sometimes he woke sweating from ugly dreams about hordes of them chasing him through the black and empty tunnels under Greenpeak. Their clutching hands were golden, like Bosun Brong's. Every one had Nurse Vesh's frowning face and stringy gray hair, and they all screamed after him in her voice, "We got your mother, and we'll get you."

Yet, in spite of everything, he soon felt happier at Greenpeak. He learned not to get black slashes. Topman Taiko sometimes smiled with his salute when they met in the corridors, and the new swabbers seemed a pretty sorry lot.

Wondering whether he was really yellow, he decided to test himself. On the Sunset holiday after the second term, when Chelni had gone back to her uncle's Northdyke home, and the school was almost empty, he took a lightgun out of the emergency box in the hall and followed a path he had planned out, through the empty gym and across the deserted duty deck to a barrier nobody could see. Heart thumping, he climbed the barrier and stumbled on down the off-limits tunnel into thickening blackness.

He had always been vaguely terrified, but also fascinated, by the dead city that lay far around and reached far beneath the tiny, lighted island of the school. Looking across the barriers into the icy dark of the uncleared tunnels, dreaming about his own forefathers who had lived and fought and died there, he had wanted to walk where they had been. The waiting dangers of rockfalls and floodwaters and deadly gas seemed real enough to test his courage, and he wouldn't have to hurt anybody else.

Beyond the barrier, he groped his way into a side tunnel before he dared use the lightgun. When he did snap it on, there wasn't really much to see. Only an endless row of black-mouthed caves opening off the gloomy passage, with nothing to tell him whether they had been shops or homes or something else.