"Robert F. Young - Tents of Kedar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

Eastcliff was dying of a disease that was impervious to modern medications. And so he found
himself on a river of the planet known as Silver Dollar, heading upstream towards a remarkable
clinic staffed by witch doctors with medical degrees.


The Tents of Kedar
BY
ROBERT F. YOUNG

Eastcliff had been on the river three days before there was any noticeable convergence of its distant
banks. Even then he wasn't certain whether the river had really begun to narrow or whether his eyes were
misinforming him. He needed tangible proof that the launch was moving upstream, not merely holding its
own against the current, and what a man needs often influences what he sees тАФ or what he thinks he
sees тАФ especially when he is dying.
There were times when Eastcliff found himself thinking of the river as a lake. The illusion was
reinforced by the almost imperceptible current, bolstered by the middle-of-the-stream course he had fed
into the A.P. so that he might remain as aloof as possible from the forested banks and the scattered
Ebononese villages. His desire for privacy accrued in large part from his nature, but there was a practical
reason behind it as well. Although the equatorial region of Silver Dollar could not properly be classified
as a primitive wilderness, the bush country through which the river ran and on whose southern edge the
Eastcliff plantation lay constituted relatively unknown territory; and although the Order of Chirurgeons,
for want of an orthodox governmental body, functioned as an authority of sorts, the bush-blacks who
swore fealty to it were for the most part only half civilized.
Eastcliff spent the long, hot days reading and remembering, wearing dark glasses to protect his
sensitive eyes from the river's glare. He did not read evenings. He sat in the stern, distinguishable from the
darkness only by the glowing ends of the cigarettes he smoked, listening to the throb of the launch engine
and the susurrus of the wake, staring at the shifting star-patterns on the water. Increasingly of late he had
been able to find beauty in the commonplace тАФ in the symmetrical serrations of a leaf, in the shy
pinkness that preceded the first rays of the morning sun, in the gray mists that materialized each evening
and shrouded the distant banks.
On the fourth evening, as the launch was passing a promontory that was too insignificant to have
triggered a course adjustment, the mists parted and a native driuh appeared. Four bush-blacks plied
hand-carved paddles and a fifth manned a crude wooden tiller. In the prow a woman stood. She was tall
and thin, and possessed the erect, almost rigid posture of her race. A bright red kerchief half hid her
night-black hair and she carried a small crimson satchel in her right hand. She was wearing a calico
half-skirt and halter; sandals woven of yellow filamentous reeds encased her feet.
She waved to Eastcliff, who was leaning on the port rail smoking a cigarette. He did not wave back,
but stared coldly down at the driuh and its Ebononese occupants, trying to analyze an irrational deja vu
which the woman had somehow evoked. The launch had not been built for speed, and the lean and
muscular paddlers had no trouble pulling the driuh alongside and holding it in position by seizing the
bottom bar of the rail. "I wish transportation to the clinic," the woman called up to Eastcliff. "You will be
amply repaid."
He wasn't surprised that she knew his destination. The Eastcliff plantation employed bush-blacks
recruited from all parts of Ebonon and was inextricably tied into the "bramblevine" that connected every
village, every biayau, every farm in the territory. All Eastcliff, his ailing mother, his sister or his
brother-in-law had to do was cough, and every bush-black in the country would know about it in a
matter of hours. But although the woman knew he was going to the clinic, she could not possibly know
why. Both the chirurgeons and the "bush-doctors" adhered rigidly to the equivalent of a Hippocratic
Oath, and the bush-doctor whom Eastcliff had consulted and who, after diagnosing his illness, had
radioed the clinic, would not have dreamed of violating his privacy.