"Baker, Kage - Lemuria Will Rise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baker Kage)

"What?" I gasped. _What was wrong with my Approach Warning Sensors?_ I ran a hasty self-diagnostic.
"They put it there, as a marker for when They come sailing down from Mount Shasta to visit. Helps 'em navigate in," he explained. He strode down the dune across the sand to me, sturdy knees and elbows pumping. I watched him in disbelief.
"Out for a breath of fresh air, are yez?" he inquired. "I come out meself, on fine nights. These Dunes is also the best place to watch the celestial movements, ye know."
"No city lights to dim the stars," I found myself remarking.
"There are not," he agreed, looking heavenward. A green firedrake crackled down the southern horizon. "Almost a pity that Lemuria's coming up so close by. They had towers in Their grand cities for the spreading of light focused through jewels. All them emeralds and rubies and sapphires winkin' away must have been a rare sight, and lit up the streets a deal better than lanterns, wouldn't ye think? But very bright."
"I suppose it would have been. Look, you don't think Lemuria's going to rise with the buildings all intact and everything in working order, do you? I mean, how long has it been at the bottom of the sea, for heaven's sake?" I cried in exasperation.
"Twelve million years," he informed me imperturbably.
"Well, there, how could there even be any ruins left after all this time?" I drew a deep breath, attempting to get a grip. The electromagnetic weirdness must be affecting me somehow. "It'll just be one big muddy unimproved ... landmass."
"So was San Francisco," he pointed out. "Nothing to speak of when the _Lima_ put in there, and look what the Americans has built there now. I hear it's fit to rival Paris or London, though of course it's nothing so grand as what _They'll_ build once They've got Their own back. Think of all them water frontage lots! And building's no trouble at all for Them, ye know, because They've got the secret of countermanding the forces of gravity."
"They have?"
"They have that. They've got a device uses cosmic rays to move great blocks of stone. Just floats 'em in as though they weighed nothing at all, at all. I daresay Their builders taught the Egyptians everything they knew. Why, the Pyramids ain't nothing to what you'll see being put up once Lemuria rises." He nodded in the direction of the sea as though he could glimpse it there already. My eyes followed his gaze involuntarily. I shook my head, as if to clear away the fog of mystical nonsense surrounding me.
"What a fascinating thought," I said, summoning every ounce of courtesy. "I have no doubt I shall dream about Lemuria's jewel-studded towers as I sleep. To which end, Senor, I must wish you Good Evening."
"And a fine Good Evening to yez as well. I think I'll just wait around and see if They drop by tonight. Yez'll be welcome to stay to meet Them, ye know." He raised his eyebrows alluringly.
"Thank you, Senor, but I am weary and fear I would not be at my social best. Give Them my regards, though, won't you?" I requested, and made my escape under the grinning stars.
When I returned to my camp there was a faint blue light blinking in my field lab. I actually grabbed up my frying pan and started for it, blood in my eye; but it was only the credenza indicator light, telling me that a transmission had come in while I was out.
I leaned down to peer at the tiny glowing screen.
_PRIORITY DIRECTIVE GREEN 07011860 2300 RE: CROME GENERATOR. INVESTIGATE FURTHER. OBTAIN DNA SAMPLE AND FORWARD TO RELAY STATION._
There was some ugly language used in the field lab, and a frying pan sailed out under the stars as though propelled by cosmic anti-gravity rays.
So, how do you get a DNA sample from a psychic?
A real two-fisted operative would move in silently, plant some expensive neuroneutralizing device (which field botanists are never given enough budget for, by the way) and get a pint of blood and maybe a finger or two from the unconscious subject.
I opted to sneak into the hermit's house while he wasn't there and collect shed hair and skin cells, but even that presented its own problems. When did he leave his wicker beehive? For how long? Did he ever go far enough away for all his blue lights to follow him and leave me the hell alone? If he did, and they did, maybe he'd be unable to perceive my rifling his belongings.
Dawn of the next day found me crouching in a willow thicket one kilometer south of the hermit's cove, scanning intently. He was home, I could tell, awake already and moving around within a tiny zone of activity; must be still within the beehive. Abruptly his signal dropped in location and its zone widened: he'd climbed out and was moving around on his lawn. Then his signal moved away due west, receding and receding. He must be going down to dig clams. That should take him a while.
I emerged from my thicket and ran like a rabbit over the dunes. In no time I went tumbling down the sand-wall into his cove and sprinted across his lawn. Well, he wouldn't need any sixth sense to know I'd been here; I could always tell him I'd just stopped by to borrow a cup of sugar or something. No blue radiation at the moment, at least.
I pushed my way into the willows about the base of his beehive and looked around.
He'd cleared a space under the bushes around the four supporting poles. It was cool and shady in there, and clearly he used it as additional living room. Over to one side was a shallow well and the banked embers of a cooking fire; over to the other side must be his library, to judge from the baskets and baskets of clamshells. There must have been hundreds of them, each one painted with knotted and interlacing patterns of dizzying Celtic complexity. Some had text, beautiful tiny lettering massed between spirals and vine leaves, but many appeared to be abstract images. There was something vaguely familiar about them, but I couldn't spare the time to look further. I scrambled up his ladder and crawled into the beehive.
Right at the doorway was his scriptorium: a chunk of redwood log two feet across, adzed flat for a work surface, with clamshells holding various inks and paints. I supposed he made them from berry juice and powdered earths. A grooved tray held little brushes made from reed cane and hair; an old graniteware cup held water. The present tome in progress was balanced on a ring of woven grass.
I didn't look at it particularly closely, or at the fiddle hanging on the wall. I made straight for the rumpled mass of sealskins that formed the old man's bed.
I swept a few long white hairs into my collector and groped around with a scraper for skin cells. Oh, great: the ancient hide was coming off too. Now the Company would think he had seal DNA.
It would have to do. Tucking the samples away, I turned to exit on my hands and knees. My gaze fell on the half-painted clamshell.
The pattern was drawn in a faint silver line, done with a knife point or an old nail maybe, and blocked in carefully in ocher and olive green. Ribbons and dots? No. A twisting ladder? No ... a DNA spiral.
A DNA spiral.
I stared at it fixedly for a long moment and then jumped down the ladder into the area below, where I grabbed up a clamshell from the nearest basket.
On its inner surface was an accurate depiction of the solar system, including Pluto and all the moons of Jupiter. And here was another one showing the coastline of Antarctica, and I couldn't identify this one but it certainly looked like circuitry designs. And what were these? Lenticular cumuli? _Where had he seen all this?_
He hadn't gotten it from any bloody Lemurians, that much I was sure of. In this time period, surely only one of Us could have painted these pictures, unless there was a serious security breach somewhere. I'd have to inform the Company.
I reflected on the possibilities as I sped back to my camp. He'd seen my field lab, of course, but I'd only been here a couple of days! He was a psychic, and a powerful one. Had he somehow been picking up transmissions from the station on the mesa nearby? If they'd been careless with their shielding, he might. Anyway it couldn't be my fault.
I rushed right into the tent and sent a breathless communication outlining what I'd found. As the last green letter flitted away into the ether, I sat back and frowned. Having been put into words, the story sounded even crazier than it was. The crew at the relay station might think I had a screw missing. Maybe I should go back and take some holoes of the clamshells to back up my story. There was still the DNA sample to send, too.
But even as I was preparing it for transmission, the credenza beeped and another message came in. I leaned over to peer at it.
PRIORITY DIRECTIVE GREEN 070218601100 RE: CROME GENERATOR. OBTAIN LIBRARY.
My jaw dropped. Hesitantly I transmitted: _CLARIFY? SPECIFY? HOW MANY?_
ENTIRE LIBRARY. OBTAIN. PRIORITY.
A long moment later I transmitted ACKNOWLEDGED.
Well, this was just great. What was I supposed to do now? Carry basket after basket of clamshells up to the relay station on the mesa?
Yes, that was exactly what I was supposed to do, and that was the easy part. How was I to obtain the old man's library in the first place? I'd like to see anybody just sort of slip four hundred pounds of clamshells into her pocket without being noticed, and I was dealing with a psychic at that.
I crawled out of the tent and stood, gloomily staring at the thickets of _Oenothera_. It wasn't as though I didn't have work of my own to do, after all. Look at all these endangered plants. And such specimens of _Lupinus chamissonis, Fragaria chiloensis, Calystegia soldanella_! Why couldn't the Company send a Security operative to deal with this? I reached out and broke off a sprig of primrose, examining closely the pattern of viral striping in a deeper pink than the salmon color of the petals...
The petals turned blue. Everything turned blue: my hand, my sleeve, the dune before me. I raised a startled face just in time to see a dark-blue blur cross the sky above me, as the electromagnetic anomaly pulsed and roared like a monster leaping out of the sand at my feet. I tried to yell, but couldn't remember how; and I fell down a tiny blue tunnel where there was nothing to see but a line of tiny letters and punctuation marks, tangling themselves together in a vain attempt to produce something other than gibberish.
After a long while they did manage to spell out a word, however, and it blinked on and off steadily. RESET. Oh. I knew what that meant. I was supposed to do something now, wasn't I? I breathed, blinked and tried to look around but found I could only move my eyes.
I lay where I had toppled backward, frozen in my last conscious attitude, arm still out, hand still clutching a sprig of _Oenothera_. A little sand had drifted into my open mouth. It was quiet and peaceful here now, and no longer blue; but the air stung with ozone and some sort of electromagnetic commotion was going on to the north of me.
To hell with it. I closed my eyes, but to my dismay saw red letters flashing behind my eyelids. PRIORITY! OBTAIN LIBRARY! My body jerked as some fried circuit repaired itself and my legs flexed, attempting to pull me up into a standing position. After several tries, during which the rigid upper half of my body jolted to and fro and got me another faceful of sand, my legs righted themselves and set off northward, staggering through the dunes. The rest of me rode along above them like an unwilling maharani atop a drunken elephant. At least some of the sand spilled out of my mouth.
As I lurched nearer I could feel the anomaly throbbing away up ahead, and a fan of blue rays spread themselves like a peacock's tail above the hermit's cove. Every instinct I had left was screaming at me to get out of there, but my lower torso blundered along like a goddam Frankenstein's Monster, stumbling occasionally and pitching me face-forward into the sand again. Frantically I went into my self-repair program and tried to get control, but it was committed to fixing my arms and would not allow override. The best I was able to do was close my mouth.
By the time I came thrashing over the top of the last dune, I had sensation again in my right arm; but what I beheld in the cove below me nearly brought on another fit of electronic apoplexy. Somebody else was stealing the library!