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

_Well, how can I say it isn't true? It seems to have happened, and anyway she believes it, Dane thought, but he still felt a little disquieted; uncanny. Still, he was content, for as her strength grew, Dallith clung to him more and more. Sometimes it almost frightened him, that she should be so completely dependent on his will-what would she do if they were separated? he thought-but mostly it did not trouble him, for she was not obtrusive or demanding. Most of the time she was content to sit quietly at his side, without speaking, almost like a shadow, while, during the next days and weeks, he took the measure of his fellow prisoners.

He seemed to be the only one-at least in their separate cell-from an isolated world. All of the others were, more or less, from the same interstellar civilization as Rianna. They were a mixed crew. The spider-thing was from a hot, wet world where his race was in a minority, and his name was an incomprehensible mangle of sibilants. And even the enormous lizard-man, Aratak, found his mental processes inaccessible, although he tried. He told Dane kindly, "He is very bewildered. I do not think he is sure what has happened; his mental processes have been shocked." Dane was less charitable; orivatelv he didn't believe the spidery alien _had any mental processes worth noticing. All he seemed able to do was huddle in a corner, hissing at anyone who came near, and when food was brought sidle out in a rush, take it, and retreat with it. Dane wrote him off as probably being of no use in their present trouble.

Rianna and Roxon, the two sturdy red-headed anthropologists, were far more congenial. Dane kept forgetting that they were not Earthmen like himself, unless one of them happened to allude to some commonplace of their lives which to him, was straight out of a science fiction movie . . . Rianna offhandedly saying that she had served a four-year apprenticeship in alien technology surveying an asteroid belt for fragments of the civilization on the exploded world; Roxon complaining that the main axis of the civilization was interested only in proto-feline technologies and tended to ignore the proto-simians (or humans) as being superficial. "Just because the damned proto-felines invented the extra-light drives, they think they own the Universe," he grumbled more than once.

As for Aratak, the lizard-man quickly became a companion, then, surprisingly, a friend. The immense alien seemed quickly more human than any of the others. His gray, rugose skin, his huge claws and teeth, were quickly forgotten; his mind worked, Dane swiftly found out, very much like Dane's own. His philosophy reminded Dane very much of the Hawaiians and Filipinos he had met on his first voyage to the Pacific; a calm acceptance of life, a willingness to take whatever came, not exactly submitting to it, but going along with it until something better came along, and incidentally getting what was good out of it. He never left a crumb of his food, he slept long and well, and he tended to fill every lull in the conversation with some excerpt from the Wisdom of the Divine Egg-who had been, Dane gradually gathered, the Confucius, Lao-Tzu, Hillel, and Hiawatha of his race. On the surface he seemed content and even complacent in their captivity, enough so as to be infuriating.

But Dane was sure it was not quite what it seemed. At first this was only a suspicion; on the eighth or ninth "day" of their captivity, the suspicion ripened into certainty.

That was the day when a man in the next cage, or cell, went mad. Dane saw him crouch, when the clanging sound came which meant that the Mekhars were on the way with food, tense and huddled within himself and all one purpose which could almost be seen. And the instant that the food-cart came into sight around the curve of the corridor he rushed the door, flung it open, and threw himself against the edge of the cart, sending it careening back and knocking the Mekhar who pushed it off his feet.

For an instant Dane tensed, thinking, _Now! Now, if they all rush him at once, at once, he couldn't kill more than one or two of them-

He actually began to spring; and then the man at the cart began to yell, incoherently, a hoarse half scream.

"Come on, you bastards! Kill me all at once, not by inches! Come on, everybody get them, better to die fighting than sit here waiting-" He grabbed the end of the food-cart and ran it over the prostrate body of the Mekhar, by now howling gibberish and screaming. Dallith shrieked and hid her face in her hands. Aratak gripped his claws on the bars, and as Dane tautened his muscles for a rush the lizard-man reached out one hand and grabbed him. His claws dug into Dane's shoulder, tearing his shirt.

"Not now," he said. "Don't throw your life away like this. _Not now!"

The loose prisoner was still howling and raging, charging up and down with the runaway food-cart. The other Mekhar raised his weapon and gestured; the madman did not seem to see him. He ran right up against him and in the instant before the food-cart ran him down the Mekhar with the weapon raised it-almost, it seemed to Dane, reluctantly-and shot him.

The man screamed, a terrible tearing sound. He dropped to the floor, writhing, convulsing, froth coming from his mouth as his muscles went into spasm after spasm of shuddering. He screamed and screamed, fainter and fainter, and at last he lay still, twitching and still convulsing. The Mekhar bent and dragged him into his cell, gesturing at his cell-mates with the drawn weapon. They all edged back before it, with horrified gasps and murmurs.

The feeding went on without further incident; but Dane could not eat, until Dallith, white as her own loose robe, refused food and faltered into the women's area to vomit; then, with hard self-discipline, Dane forced himself to pick up his food and chew it, doggedly. He should have known. Dallith was so much a reflection of his own moods....

With the new knowledge of this, he ate, refusing to think about the would-be escapee; when Dallith, gray and shaking, came back, he pulled her down beside him and gently fed her little pieces from his own tray until the color began to come back into her cheeks, then sat by her until she slept. The wounded man in the next cell moaned and twitched and foamed and screamed more and more faintly, although his cell-mates tended him, until some time that night he died. The next morning at feeding-time the Mekhars hauled his body away.

The rows of cells were very quiet as the man's body was taken away. But when the Mekhars disappeared again and the clanging sound of the cell-block lock assured them all that the Mekhars were gone, the quiet tension of horror broke and everyone began talking at once.

Dane found Aratak by his side; the lizard-man's great scaled paws, claws flicking in and out, rested lightly on his shoulder. He said to Dane, "For a moment, yesterday, I thought you were going to throw your life after his."

"For a moment I thought of it. But it isn't in me to commit suicide, and I realized in time that was what he was doing. If everyone had joined him, of course, we probably could have done it"

"Yes," Aratak said. "This has been on my mind. But it must be carefully planned and decided. A mad rush, even with the wild hope that the others will join us, is not the way to begin such an effort. The Divine Egg has said that a man is a fool who holds his life too dear-but twice a fool is he who holds it cheap enough to throw away."

Dane glanced guardedly around. Dallith was sleeping, and he was glad; already the fear of frightening her was a daylong preoccupation with him. (He asked himself then: was it love? Certainly not in a sexual sense, at least not yet. But a constant, living preoccupation, so that her welfare was more to him than his own, so that she lived somewhere in the innermost core of his being . . . yes; call it love.) Then he said, "I take it you go along with me-that it ought to be possible to escape, with care and cooperation. I think these Mekhars underrate us. They probably think no one but themselves is clever enough to think it out But have you noticed that the doors are unlocked, and virtually unguarded, for the best part of half an hour, twice a day?"

"I've noticed," Aratak said. "For a time I thought it seemed almost too easy. As if they were trying to tempt us to escape, for some unknown reason of their own. But why would they do that? Sheer blood-lust? They could have one of us up to kill every day, if that were their pleasure. So I have come around to the conclusion you seem to have reached; that it is their arrogance. They simply do not believe that anyone except themselves could take advantage of such an opportunity; they believe we simply fear them and their weapons too much."

He stopped; his normally placid voice was fierce.

"Would you like to teach those damned cat-things their mistake?"

Dane thrust out his hand in a spontaneous gesture of camaraderie. "I'm with you!" Only when the scaly paw, claws carefully retracted, closed gingerly over his hand, did he recall that his new comrade was not what most people would call a man.

Agreed, they sat down in a corner of the cell to make their plans. "We can't do it alone, just the two of us. And it's going to need time-and planning."

"True. The Divinely Wise Egg has told us that an act of folly can be successful only if it is planned twice as wisely as an act of wisdom."