"Anderson, Poul - Star Fox" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

"Nonsense. When two old friends meet again, halfway between home and the Southern Cross, what else do they do but have a private gabfest? Come in, man."
The door closed behind them. He looked around. Her cabin was large and comfortable, and she had made it her own. He recognized some things from her lost San Francisco homea Matisse and a Hiroshige reproduction, some worn volumes of Catullus, Yeats, Tagore, Pasternak, Mosunic-Lopez, the flute he had once loved to heat her playand there were a few souvenirs of her years in the Epsilon Indi System, less from Ourania than from stark New Mars. His attention returned to her and stayed. She had on an electric blue dress and a Gean necklace of massive silver. The outfit was at once quiet and stunning. Or was that simply the contents?
Whoa, boy! he checked himself. Aloud: "You haven't changed."
"Liar. But thanks." Her eyes dwelt on him. "You have, anyway. Tired and bitter."
"Why, no, I feel happier now than" His protest was cut off. She let his hands go and went to a table where bottles and ice stood.
"Let's do something about it," she said. "As I recall, you're a Scotch drinker. And here's some sho-nuff Glenlivet."
"Eh? You always preferred light wine."
"Well, VieDr. Bragdon, you knowhe shares your taste, and very kindly gave us this from his locker." She poured. For a moment the clear gurgle was the only sound in the universe.
What the devil right have I to feel jealous? "I'm not sure what, uh, you're doing out here with him."
"Officially I'm secretary to the expedition. I have such skills from my job before I married, and got the rust off them working for the peace movement. Then too, I've had experience on other planets, including planets where you need special equipment to live. I used to go to New Mars quite often, ostensibly with Edgar's mineral prospectors, actually to get awayNo matter. That's past. When I heard about this expedition, I applied for a berth and, rather to my surprise, got it. I suppose that was partly because most qualified people were scared to come so near the big bad Aleriona, partly because Vie knew me and felt I could handle it." She handed him a glass and raised her own. "Welcome aboard, Gunnar. Here's to the old days." They clinked rims, wordless.
"When life was simple and splendid," she added. Tossing off a sip of her Chablis, she toasted again, defiantly. "And here's to the future. We'll make it the same."
"Well, let's hope so." His mouth creased upward. She'd always been overly, dramatic, but his own stolidity had found it a trait more endearing than otherwise.
"Sit down." She waved him to her lounger, but he took a chair instead. Jocelyn chuckled and relaxed in the form-fitting seat. "Now," she said, "tell me about yourself."
"Didn't you get a bellyful of me in the news?"
"There sure was plenty." She clicked her tongue. "The entire Solar System in an uproar. Half the people wanted to hang you and H-bomb France for commissioning you. The rest" Her humor waned. "I hadn't known there was so much popular support for your side of the issue. Your departure crystallized it, somehow."
He gathered his nerve and said, "Frankly, that's what I hoped. One decisive gesture, to cut through that wretched muddle ... Okay, you can throw me out."
"No, Gunnar. Never." She leaned over and patted his hand. "I think you're wrong, horribly wrong, but I never doubted you mean well."
"Same for you, of course. Wish I could say likewise for some of your associates. And mine, I must admit. I don't like having the approval of some pretty nasty fanatics."
"Nor I. The MilitantsI quit them when they started openly applauding mob violence."
"They tried to blackmail me through my daughter," he said.
"Oh, Gunnar!" Her clasp tightened over his knuckles. "And I never came to see you while she was missing. There was this work for the movement, way off on Venus, and by the time I got back and heard, everything was finished and you were gone. But ... are you serious? Did Yore's people really"
"I fixed that," he said. " 'Druther not say any more. We had to keep it out of the news. I'm glad, Joss, you broke with them."
"Not with what they meant in the beginning, though," she said. Tears glimmered suddenly in the long hazel eyes; he wondered on whose account. "Another reason I wanted to get off Earth. Everything was such a ghastly mess, no clear rights or wrongs anyplace you searched." She drew a breath before continuing, with swift earnestness:
"But can't you see what harm the French have done? It looked as if the dispute with Alerion could be settled peacefully. Now the peacemakers have been tied in a legal knot, and it's all they can do to prevent the extremists from taking over control of Parliament. The Aleriona delegation announced they weren't going to wait any longer. They went home. We'll have to send for them when our deadlock is broken."
"Or come after them, if it breaks my way," he said. "What you can't see, you won't see, is that they've no intention of making any real peace. They want Earth out of space altogether."
"Why?" she pleaded. "It doesn't make sense!"
He frowned into his glass. "That's something of a puzzle, I admit. It must make sense in their own terms; but they don't think like us. Look at the record, however, not their soft words but their hard deeds ever since we first encountered them. Including the proof that they deliberately attacked New Europe and are deliberately setting out to exterminate the French colonists there. Your faction denied the evidence, but be honest with yourself, Joss."
"You be honest too, GunnarNo, look at me. What can a single raider do but make the enmity worse? There aren't going to be any more privateers, you realize. France and her allies have been able to keep Parliament from illegalizing your expedition, so far. But the Admiralty has frozen all transfers of ships, and it'll take more of a legislative upheaval than France can engineer to get that authority out of its hands. You'll die out there, Gunnar, alone, for nothing."
"I'm hoping the Navy will move," he said. "If, as you put it, I make enmity worseUh-uh, not a delusion of grandeur. Just a hope. But a man has to do what little he can."
"So does a woman," she sighed.
Abruptly, sweeping to her feet, taking his glass for a refill, smiling with an effort but not as a pretense: "No more argument. Let's be only ourselves this evening. It's been such a long time."
"Sure has. I wanted to see you, I mean really see you; when you came back to Earth, but we were both too busy, I guess. Somehow the chance never seemed to come."
"Too busy, because too stupid," she agreed. "Real friends are so rare at best. And we were that once, weren't we?"
"Rawthuh," he said, as anxious as she to walk what looked like a safe road. "Remember our junket to Europe?"
"How could I forget?" She gave him back his glass and sat down again, but upright this time, so that her knee brushed his. "That funny little old tavern in Amsterdam, where you kept bumping your head every time you stood up, till finally you borrowed a policeman's helmet to wear. And you and Edgar roared out something from the Edda, andBut you were both awfully sweet outside Sacre Coeur, when we necked and watched the sun rise over Paris."
"You girls were a lot sweeter, believe me," he said, not quite comfortably. A silence fell. "I'm sorry it didn't last between you and him," he ventured.
"We made a mistake, going outsystem," she admitted. "By the time we realized how much the environment had chewed our nerves, it was too late. He's got himself quite a good wife now."
"Well, that's something."
"What about you, Gunnar? It was so dreadful about poor Connie. But after five years, haven't you?"
"After five years, nothing," he said flatly. "I don't know why."
She withdrew herself a little and asked with much gentleness, "I dare not flatter myself, but could I be to blame?"
He shook his head. His face burned. "No. That was over with long ago. Let's discuss something else."
"Sure. This is supposed to be a merry reunion. A nuestra salud." The glasses clinked again.
She began to talk of things past, and presently he was chiming in, the trivia that are so large a part of friendshipdo you remember, whatever became of, we did, once you said, we thought, do you remember, and then there was, we hoped, I never knew that, do you remember, do you remember?and the time and the words and the emptied glasses passed, and finally somehow she was playing her flute for him, "Au Clair de la Lune" and "Gaudeamus Igitur," "September" and "Shenandoah," Pan-notes bright and cool through the whirl in him, while he had moved to the lounger and lay back watching the light burnish her hair and lose itself in the deep shadows below. But when she began "The Skrydstrup Girl"
"Was it her that I ought to have loved, then, In a stone age's blossoming spring"
the flute sank to her lap and he saw her eyes shut and her mouth go unfirm.
"No," she said. "I'm sorry. Wasn't thinking. You taught it to me, Gunnar."
He sat straight and laid a clumsily tender hand on her shoulder. "Forget that business," he said. "I should've kept my "big mouth shut. But there was no real harm done. It was no more than ... than one of those infatuations. Connie didn't hold it against you. She nursed me through the spell okay."
"I wasn't so lucky," she whispered.
Dumfounded, he could only stammer: "Joss, you never let on!"