"Robert F. Young - L'Arc de Jeanne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

in tracing the girl your Magnificence, and I assigned three experienced ship-to-ground agents to
investigate the case. They subsequently discovered that her name is Jeanne Marie Valcouris and that she
lives all alone in a cave in Le Bois Feerique. Le Bois Feerique is a sizable woods located near a bucolic
village named Baudelaire, which lies on the Provencal Plateau some fifty kilometers to the north of Fleur
du Sud. She is known to its inhabitants as la Pucelle du Bois Feerique, and had it not been for your
Magnificence's decision to suspend hostilities temporarily, thereby making it impossible for her to put in
an appearance on other battlefields, the cognomen by now would have attained planet-wide circulation,
and she would be firmly entrenched in the minds of her countrymen as an anti-denationalization
Psycho-Phenomenalist heroine. As matters stand, the religio-patriotic zeal which she might have
awakened still slumbers.
"Like most Ciel Bleu villages, Baudelaire is backward and bucolic and stubbornly adheres to the
anti-progressive spirit of the French colonists who took over the planet three centuries ago. Jeanne Marie
Valcouris' mother died while giving birth to her and her father died nine years later, at which time Jeanne
Marie was consigned to a small Provencal-subsidized orphanage on the outskirts of the village. Up until
the age of twelve she behaved normally enough and then, unaccountably, she ran away and hid herself in
Le Bois Feerique. The orphanage officials finally located herтАФshe was living in a natural cave and
appeared to be in excellent health тАФbut when they tried to take her back to the orphanage, she did
something that frightened them so thoroughly that they fled from the forest and never bothered her again.
Exactly what she did, we were unable to ascertain, but it seems that even prior to the Battle of Fleur du
Sud the inhabitants of Baudelaire regarded her as an evil witch. Since the battle they have altered their
viewpoint and now regard her as a good witch, but they are hardly less reluctant to enter Le Bois
Feerique.
"There appears to be considerable justification for their attitude. A number of them claim to have
overheard her talking to trees and flowers, and the several who were bold enough to question her claim
that she told them that it wasn't trees and flowers she was talking to but 'voices in her head.' TheyтАФ"
"Voices?" O'Riordan interrupted.
"Yes, your Magnificence. Obviously she is suffering from audio-visual hallucinations of the type
generally associated with acute malnutrition. We know that she was brought up a strict
Psycho-Phenomenalist, and I think we may safely conclude that she is a fanatic, and fasts for weeks at a
time. Under circumstances such as that, it would be strange if she didn't hear voices and see visions."
"But the bow," O'Riordan said. "Where did she get the bow?"
MCGRAWSKI: "I'm sorry to say that we were unable to find out, your Magnificence. She carries it
with her wherever she goes and there is always a quiverful of arrows on her shoulder. Assuming that a
weapon capable of precipitating an isolated cloudburst would be capable of any number of things, I
instructed the ship-to-ground agents not to let her see them except when absolutely necessary and not to
provoke her in any way. Perhaps if they could have entered her cave when she was absent from it, they
might have been able to learn more, butтАФ"
O'RIORDAN: "But why couldn't they enter it? What was there to stop them?"
SMITH-KOLGOZ (hastily getting to his feet): "I ordered them not to, your Magnificence. After they
located her, I devised a plan for abducting her that would entail a minimum of risk, and I didn't want to
take a chance of tipping our hand ahead of time. Moreover, to carry out the plan successfully, I knew I
would need to know as much about the girl's personality as possible, so I ordered the agents to
concentrate on the villagers who knew her before she ran away from the orphanage and to question them
exhaustively about her likes and her dislikes, her habits, and her attitude toward life. You do want her
abducted, don't you, your Magnificence?"
O'RIORDAN: "Of course I do."
SMITH-KOLGOZ: "Good. Here then, your Magnificence, is what I've done thus far. First, I fed the
data which the agents brought back into the Ambassadress's computer, together with the following
command: 'Describe the sort of male which a female of this type would be most susceptible
toтАФphysically, emotionally, and intellectually.' Next, I correlated the computer's subsequent description