"Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Hunters of the Red Moon - 1973" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradley Marion Zimmer)

This went on, Dane later surmised, for about two weeks. There was nothing for the captives to do except to exchange life histories, if they chose, to tell each other about their home worlds, and, in general, to get to know one another. Dane told them all he could about the social and political history of Earth, although he suspected part of their interest was wonder and amazement that even a partially civilized world could so far have been missed by the Unity. Only Rianna hazarded a guess as to why this might have been.

"You have a certain degree of scientific and technological advancement," she agreed, "but in other fields you're far behind, probably because you _are so cut oft For instance, you say that never in your known history have you been visited even by observer or guest teams from other planets."

"Not in our known history, no. Although some scientists have suspected that some of our religious myths may be garbled memories of such visits before written history."

"That seems unlikely," Dallith protested. "Scientist and observer teams from the Unity, at least, are usually very careful to make certain that the planets they visit don't get any such notions!"

"But there's no way of telling that the visitors were from the Unity-if there were any such visitors," Rianna said. "They might have been from anywhere. No, the most likely thing is that they simply overlooked your solar system. There are so very _many uninhabited worlds that one, or two, or two hundred, could simply be overlooked in cataloguing. Didn't you say that only one world in your system is habitable by ordinary animal life? That's very unusual; the most likely thing is that they visited one or two planets, found them uninhabitable, and gave up on the system. Sloppy scientific work, of course, but it does happen."

Dallith suggested, "Perhaps your Earth was visited at a time before sapient life had developed. Or while your men were still living in treetops."

Aratak rumbled, "That wouldn't stop them. My world entered the Unity before the Divine Egg had gifted us with the wheel!"

This made Dane Marsh remember a favorite theory of science fiction writers. "People used to suggest that visitors from space had avoided us, or put us under a sort of Cosmic quarantine, because of our atomic wars and such."

"If total and permanent peace were a qualification," Rianna said dryly, "the Unity might possibly be made up of as many as two dozen worlds, mostly inhabited by empaths. Instead of, as we now have, several hundred. The Unity will do anything possible to help member planets resolve their internal differences-and sometimes even the presence of the Unity helps the people of a planet to develop a feeling of solidarity and internal harmony with one another. But the way the Unity is set up, it simply serves as a total barrier to _interplanetary or _interstellar war. Most planets settle the war problem earlier in their history than yours, but then yours seems to have a history torn by climatic changes, natural cataclysms, and the like, which typically cut off small groups of people from other small groups, and exaggerated their ethnic, cultural, social, and linguistic differences. The result would, naturally, be a prolonging of the 'war' period in planetary history. Although I admit it's a _little freaky for wars to be prolonged past the Industrial Revolution stage of development."

Dane was glad to get away from discussion of his "freaky" culture and to hear about the others. Dallith came from a highly homogeneous world which had, after a long period of ice ages followed by periods of flood and then of tropical growth, placed so high a value on psi powers for survival that ESP and clairvoyance were firmly established in the racial germ plasm. They were a peaceful people, few in number due to rigorous natural selection, with small technology but highly developed sciences of philosophy and cosmology. Rianna's people were more like what Dane had always believed that Earth-men might be someday-a scientific civilization with a highly developed technology and a tradition of endless exploration and scientific curiosity.

Aratak's world couldn't have been more the reverse. Here the dominant race, descended from giant saurians and amphibians, virtually without natural enemies, and vegetarian, had briefly experimented with technology, found that its rewards did not compensate them for its troubles, and peacefully turned their backs on it to live, as a race, a contemplative life in a food-gathering culture. They imported a few-not many-artifacts from their companion world, a highly technological race of people who called themselves by a name which the mechanical translator embedded _in Dane's throat rendered as the Salamanders. In return they supplied them with raw minerals, certain foodstuffs, and philosophy, which was evidently regarded as a marketable commodity like any other. In fact, Dane gathered that men of Aratak's lizard-like race traveled all over the known Galaxy as teachers of philosophy, and were highly regarded, and treated with lavish hospitality, in return for the great sacrifice of leaving their beloved and peaceful swamps.

But such stories as they could interchange from their planetary history filled up only part of the time. They had all too much time for brooding, worrying about their eventual fate. It seemed that time dragged endlessly; there were times when it seemed, at least to Dane, that he had been a prisoner for many years.

Abruptly, it came to an end.

One morning-or at least what Dane called morning, for it was the first meal following a period of sleep-their cell was entered by three Mekhars with drawn nerve-guns and a portable tangler field, which they took the precaution of turning up to full force before entering, and unchaining Dane or Aratak.

One of the Mekhars said tersely, "Make no mistake. You will be given-now-no single chance to escape. Even a single unauthorized move, and you will be instantly shocked into total unconsciousness. You will not be killed and you will not be tortured, but you will not be allowed to escape, so you may as well preserve your energies. This is the only warning you will receive, so move carefully. Believe me, you will not be given the benefit of the doubt."

Dane made no sudden moves. He had no desire to try out for himself what a nerve-gun felt like; he still remembered the screams of the man who had died. His curiosity was caught by one unexpected phrase, _You will be given-_now-_no single chance to escape. Did that mean that _later, they would be given some single chance? It was worth thinking about. (The mechanical translator was almost unbelievably literal; on one occasion when

Rianna, infuriated by Dallith's calm, had thrown some kind of colloquial insult at her, the translator had rendered it, simply, to imply that Dallith was a bringer of food to children. Which certainly was no insult by Dane's terms, and probably, judging by Dallith's expression, none by hers either-which hadn't made Rianna any calmer!)

Evidently the other three prisoners had reached the same conclusion on their own, for they went peacefully with the Mekhars along the winding corridors and up the ramps, until they reached what looked like a small conference room in which half a dozen of the Mekhars, uniformed like ship's personnel, were waiting; there were what looked like television screens and receivers, various other equipment, and a variety of seats. The Mekhars motioned their four captives into seats in what looked like a jury-box, or musician's gallery, along one side of the room; as soon as they were in then- seats, restraints (automatically operated, perhaps by their weight) immediately gripped them around the waist and held them fast

The jury-box arrangement already had one inhabitant; and he was a Mekhar, but he was held by the same kind of restraints as Dane and his companions. To Dane, all the Mekhars looked quite a bit alike, but it seemed there was something familiar about this one; and no sooner had he come to this conclusion than Dallith, next to him, leaned over and whispered, "It's the Mekhar you disarmed-the guard from the cell. I thought we had killed him."

"No such luck, evidently," Dane whispered back.

"The prisoners will be silent," one of the Mekhars said unemotionally.

Dane looked around the room where he found himself, his attention immediately gripped by what looked like an enormous vision-screen. Reception was wavy and ridden with what, on Earth-type TV, would have been called "ghosts," but it was evidently a live transmission. The picture on the screen was nothing very startling, for none of the other captives gave it even a second glance, far less watching it closely; but to Dane it was an incredible marvel. It was neither more nor less than a planet, seen from out in space, vaguely brick-red, with blue-green areas which looked like oceans and dull brown spots which might have been mountain ranges or deserts. In the sky behind it-or, more properly, in the dark star-flecked _space behind it-hung a huge moon, or satellite, fully half the size of the parent planet, and partially eclipsed by it.

One of the Mekhars in uniform was seated before a prosaic-looking console and was talking into it, in a low voice, just monotonous background noise, too low for Dane's translator to function. This went on for some time; the planet, and its half-eclipsed satellite, grew larger and more definite in the viewing screen. Evidently they were approaching some planet. Were they going to land on it, Dane wondered, and was it the Mekhars' home world? And what was going to happen to them there? The extreme caution with which they had been treated seemed like a good sign-they evidently weren't going to be killed out of hand-but were they going to have to stand trial for something or other? For killing a Mekhar, perhaps?

Abruptly the monotonous undertone of the Mekhar speaking into the console stopped-interrupted by a series of soft, but high-pitched beeps, clicks, and mutterings from the console. The Mekhar seated there moved various dials and levers. A speaker on the console came to life, and a curiously low, steady voice-almost, Dane thought, a _mechanical voice-remarked:

"Central Station, Second Continent, speaking to the Mekhar ship. We acknowledge your message and stand ready to receive your offer."