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

A tall hush-black woman clad in blue passed Eastcliff and his escort, and Eastcliff knew without
needing to be told that she was one of the chirurgeons. She wore a hood rather than a cap, and her gown
fell all the way to her ankles. A veil-like gauze mask covered her nose and mouth and chin, its immaculate
whiteness in sharp contrast with the rest of her attire. It was true, then, about the masks. What wasn't
true was the widely circulated rumor that the masks were on the order of the grotesque affairs worn in
olden days by Afro witch doctors.
At the corridor's end, a stairway right-angled upward to a low-ceilinged second story. Eastcliff had
to stoop to enter the room to which the blue-cowled man conducted him. Like the others he had seen, it
contained a bed, a cabinet and a chair. A refuse container stood beside the bed. Wearily he sat down on
the chair; when he looked back at the doorway he saw that the blue-cowled man had been supplanted
by a timid girl wearing a green cap and a green dress.
Diffidently she asked him to undress and don the hospital gown she had brought. He obeyed, hiding
to the best of his ability the revulsion her nearness evoked in him: He did not fool her any more than he
had fooled Sefira. He sat on the side of the bed and she took a sample of his blood from his right arm.
He saw that her hands were trembling and realized that she was terrified of him. When she finished she
said in a trembling voice, "The chirurgeon that is assigned to you will come see you as soon as analysis is
been made." She almost ran from the room.
He lit a cigarette, smoked for a while, then threw the butt on the floor. He lay back on the bed,
covered himself with its single sheet and clasped his hands behind his head. He stared up at the scrubbed
blue ceiling, realizing how tired, how exhausted he was. The river journey had consumed what little
energy the Meiskin schizomycetes had left him. The brightness of the still-cool morning came through the
room's only window, and the ceiling reflected it into his eyes, sending splinters of pain into his retinas. He
had removed his dark glasses upon entering the clinic, but he did not bother to get them out of his coat on
the chair beside the bed. Instead he continued to stare masochistically up at the ceiling. Hypersensitivity
to light was the prelude to the blindness that in turn was the prelude to the death that came seconds later.
Meiskin, after isolating his precious bacterium, had dealt lovingly with the inexorable progression of the
disease in a learned paper in a learned journal that learned researchers like himself subscribed to. His fate
was assured. Like Raynaud's, like Addison's, like Parkinson's....
Eastcliff must have slept. The morning coolness had given way to the asphyxiating warmth of midday,
and he was no longer alone in the room.
Just within the doorway, a statue stood тАФ tall, blue-gowned, white-masked. And above the mask,
black depths of eyes into which he had gazed before.
Sefira.
She walked over to the bed with that effortless grace of hers and took his pulse with long, cool
fingers. "Why?" he demanded. 'Why didn't you tell me you were my chirurgeon?"
She did not look into his eyes. "If I had, would you have continued your journey?"
"No."
"So I did not tell you."
"What were you doing in the bush?"
"All chirurgeons live in the bush. It is our home. I live near where you took me on board."
"And you commute by driuhs?"
"We reside here at the clinic except on our days off; then we depend on driuhs. Yesterday was my
day off. Yesterday evening, you came along."
He said, "You knew I was coming, didn't you."
"Yes, of course. I had been assigned to you, had I not? And now I have good news for you. The
tests we made of your blood show conclusively that the vaccine series was successful."
"What vaccine series?"
Without answering, she withdrew an ampule from a pocket of her gown and rolled up his right
sleeve. He felt a faint prick; a moment later she tossed the empty ampule into the waste container by the
bed. "That was the first of the supplementary injections. There will be seven more, which my assistants