"Baker,_Kage_-_Facts_Relating_to_the_Arrest_of_Dr._Kalugin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baker Kage)

"I guess not." He moved restlessly in the saddle. "Have you got my orders?" he demanded. I drew out my credenza at once and checked.
"No, Courier, not yet."
"They'll _never_ come," he cried mournfully. I just shrugged and urged my horse on down the trail. After a moment he followed me, sad and silent, and finally caught up as we crossed the road and neared the stockade.
"Maybe we could eat dinner with the other Russian guys here, tonight, instead of just sitting in that dark room?" he asked.
"You mean dine in the Officers' mess?" I was nonplussed. "Er -- you might find it a little boring." The truth was that I was fairly certain he hadn't paid much attention to my lecture on Russian habits; and as peculiar as he seemed to me, he'd seem even stranger to my fellow officers.
"Oh, no, it'd be neat!" he told me. "Is it anything like that party in _Anna Karenina_? The one with Greta Garbo?"
I paused in my saddle to access and got a mental image of a vodka-swilling Vronsky (as portrayed by Fredric March) crawling under a table. "Good heavens, no! Dear God, if we carried on like that we'd _really_ lose money here!" I chuckled.
But he insisted, and so that evening we dined at the long table in the Officer's mess. He helped himself to great quantities of salmon, of piroshki and blini and caviar, so I wasn't too surprised when he turned up his nose at the serving of venison stew. He didn't want the kvass again, either, he went straight for the vodka; I was half afraid he'd attempt to reenact the window-ledge scene from _War and Peace_, but he behaved himself. Perhaps that film wasn't in his internal library. No, he sipped sensibly and stared around him with his usual pleased expression, listening to the amazingly dull mess conversations as though they were fantastic adventure stories.
When the servant had cleared away the plates and small after-dinner cigars had been lit, in strode Iakov Babin. He came frequently for vodka and cigars at our mess, and not merely to enjoy the bachelor atmosphere; rumor had it he was an expert cheat at cards. He glanced over, saw Courier and gave him a fierce glare: then, thank heaven, ignored him as he pulled out a deck and settled down to win inordinate amounts of Company scrip from a junior manager who ought to have known better but didn't want to appear timid. Courier watched in fascination; and when I was momentarily distracted by the clerk who kept the Company store, who buttonholed me to complain about his rheumatism, Courier got up and went over to the card table to have a closer look.
"That looks like fun," he told them hopefully.
"Would you like to join the game?" responded the junior manager, even more hopefully.
"Oh, I don't know how to play," Courier replied, and every head in the room turned toward him. A young man, supposedly a Russian, who didn't play cards in that day and age? _How much more conspicuous could he make himself?_
"Yes, Andrei Andreivich, that does sound serious." I looked over at Courier, wondering what on Earth he was doing. "Er -- look here, it sounds to me as though a violent purge is needed. Rid yourself of poisons, you know."
"You've never played _cards_?" the junior manager was gaping at Courier.
"A purge!" Andrei backed away a pace or two. "Do you think that's really necessary, Doctor?"
"You never know. Of course he's played cards, gentlemen, but he's from Kiev, after all; he's never learned Frontier Rules." I moved swiftly to the table and addressed Courier. "You play Picquet, I'm sure, and Whist, don't you?" _Tell them you play Whist, for God's sake!_
_Okay._ "Yes, I play Whist," he agreed.
"Well, shall we have a game, then?" I pulled out a chair and sat down.
"Whist!" Iakov Dmitrivich exhaled a cloud of noxious blue smoke and bit down on his cigar viciously. "Well, _I'm _out! That ain't no game for me." He folded his cards and threw them on the table, pausing just long enough to chalk his winnings. The junior manager looked relieved, nevertheless.
"Whist, yes, what a grand idea!" he babbled. "Haven't played in ages! Be a bit of a change, won't it? Shall we, ah ... shall we wager?" He must have seen foolish-looking Courier as his chance to repair his losses.
"I'm not certain my friend has much money -- " I began, but Courier smiled and reached into his coat.
"I've got lots of cash! See?" He emptied his purse on the table. Out jingled a collection of Coins of the World; gold pieces from Chile, American dollars, French francs, British half-crowns, Russian rubles and a mongrel mass of small change.
"Looks fine to me." The junior manager shuffled the deck with slightly shaky hands. "Stiva, will you partner me?" His assistant clerk pulled up another chair and Courier sat down too, and the junior manager dealt the cards.
I transmitted the rules of Whist to Courier, who nodded with a shrewd expression and sorted quickly through his hand. We lost the first hand; thereafter he watched the cards keenly, and within a few more hands we began to win, and then win _every time_.
I looked up in horror as I realized what he was doing. You've never used your cyborg abilities to win at cards, and neither would I, of course: but it didn't seem to have occurred to Courier that he'd draw attention to himself by memorizing the positions of the cards, and using his knowledge to win. The chalked figures on the table grew higher and higher as we won more sums in scrip from the junior manager, who sat in a veritable pool of sweat. The room grew unpleasantly silent; Iakov Babin, who had been leaning by the fire regaling a small crowd with bloodcurdling tales of an Indian massacre, left off talking and stared across the room at us with an ironical grin. I met his eyes and he nodded as if to say, What did I tell you? _Dybbuk_!
_Courier, for God's sake, what are you doing? Let the mortals win _some_ of the time!_
He looked up at me in puzzlement. _But I thought the object of the game was to win._
Now, it will undoubtedly have dawned on you by this time that there was something wrong with Courier. It had even dawned on me. We aren't made stupid, and yet he was behaving like a perfect ass! And then I had what I thought was a moment of blinding revelation: he was a courier because that was the only job he was _fit_ for, running from one place to another with a bag of papers! I looked across at his innocent face and all the old horror stories of early experiments came into my mind, before the Company perfected us, before they had managed to give us immortal _minds_ to compare with our immortal bodies. _Was he one such Golem?_ Yes, you shiver: imagine how I felt, sitting across the table from him!
"Babin, I declare you've got the Evil Eye!" I tittered. "You've broken our winning streak." And I put down just the wrong card. There was a gasp of relief from the junior manager. Courier started and stared. "But -- " he protested.
_Enough! There'll be trouble here if you win any more!_
_Oh. Okay._
"I'm done." I yawned prodigiously. "Gracious, the air's blue in here! Time I went to bed. You'd better turn in too, young man; you'll have a long journey ahead of you once we've got those papers signed."
"Here, now, that's hardly fair," the assistant clerk complained. "We sat out our run of bad luck; you should do the same!"
"He played damned well for somebody who didn't know much about cards," muttered the junior manager. As I sought for the right words to defuse the situation, Courier was scooping up his little bag of coins unconcernedly.
"I'll just take these," he said. "You can have the scrip stuff back; I can't use it anyway." Everyone looked at him, dumfounded.
"Yes, capital idea, all debts canceled!" I cried in false heartiness. "Let's end our evening on a friendly note, shall we?"
The junior manager stared as that sank in and then smiled desperately. "All right! _All _debts canceled, fellows, what do you say?" And as I exited the room, hastily pushing Courier ahead of me, I could hear Babin's roar of denial over the timid chorus of agreement.
"What on Earth possessed you to _do_ that?" I exploded, when we were a safe distance down the corridor. "It's all very well for you to be careless of your own cover, but you're endangering mine! I'm obliged to live with those men for the next few years, and what will they think of me?"
His face was so stupidly blank I felt guilty at once. If he were indeed some indestructible simpleton, anger was wasted on him; and I was already thinking _poor fellow, it's not his fault after all _when he opened his mouth to speak.
"Say, have you got my orders yet?"
It was as if he had thrown vodka onto a bonfire. My rage, which had shrunk so rapidly into little blue coals, flared to the ceiling again, and higher than the flames of anger and impatience were those of loathing for the scarecrow, the defective, the _badly made machine_ that he was. Bigotry? Yes, I suppose so. Humbling thought, isn't it?
"Fool!" I snapped. "Don't you think if any orders had come in I'd have told you? Here!" I grabbed out my credenza and thrust it at him. "_You_ look from now on! Keep it until your damned orders come in, and leave me alone!"
I set off down the corridor to my room, but he followed me swiftly. "Can't we go somewhere else? Isn't there anything else to do around here?" he pleaded.
"No! But here's an order for you, you imbecile!" I turned on him. "_Go to your room and stay there_!!"
His reaction was extraordinary. All the color drained from his face; with a queer frightened look he dodged around me and stumbled down the corridor to his room. I went into my own quarters, feeling guilty again. What could be wrong with the creature? Well, I hadn't made him the way he was, anyway; and surely I'd played host beyond the call of duty. Perhaps he'd let me get a full night's sleep now.
Dawn next day found me creeping from my room, carrying a real volume of Schiller and the envelope containing the access code strip. I left the stockade and descended the steep path into the cove. The old shipyard was still being used for carpentry, and the forge and tannery were down here too; but it was still so early that there was no one about to see me hurry across the footbridge and disappear into the woods on the other side of the stream. I found a clearing under a stand of red pines with a floor of dry brown needles; and there I settled down happily, took out Mendoza's letter, and accessed the code at last.
Instantly my mind was ringing with Latin names and three-dimensional images of growing things and their uses. To my astonishment I realized that acorn meal from _Quercus agrifolia_, if left to mold, produced a useful antibiotic. And the leaves of _Rubus ursinus _could be used against dysentery? Really? And, my goodness, what a lot of uses for _Asclepias speciosa_, which was nothing more than milkweed!
Oh, well. Doubtless I'd find dozens of interesting little weeds next time I went exploring. For now, however, I intended to stay where I was until Courier got his damned orders and took his much-desired leave. I was thoroughly weary of him. I yawned, stretched out my boots and immersed myself in Schiller's poems.
What a pleasant morning I had. Before long the forge started up, and a breeze brought me the hot smell of charcoal and the bell-note of hammer on anvil. At the bottom of my glade the stream rushed and chattered along, brown as tea. It was a holy stream, I remembered with amusement; not long ago a visiting priest had blessed it, and consecrated it, and now we had an unlimited supply of holy water. How thoughtful of the reverend father! Just what was needed on the frontier.
My idyll was shattered by no end of commotion at the forge. I jumped up and ran to the edge of my clearing, where I beheld Konstantin the smith, hip-deep in the stream, splashing and stumbling in a circle. He was trying to shake off a tiny mongrel dog, which had hold of the seat of his trousers with a positive death-grip and swung by its clamped teeth, growling ferociously. Konstantin sobbed oaths upon the little cur, imploring a whole host of blessed saints to smash it like a cockroach. From the bank of the stream four little naked Indians watched with solemn black eyes.