"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 1 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

She felt acutely uncomfortable, her earlier mood completely destroyed by her empathic awareness of his pain. "You said it yourself -- people out here, outside home and culture, don't get married. Least of all you. I know I turned you on more than once, and you turned me on, too, but if we'd had sex, it would have changed things and you know it. I would have been demoted to on-board whore and there would have been no sense of equality at all. You're too much in love with this lifestyle to love somebody personally. Sex you got back here, probably better than I could do it."
"And you didn't?"
"I -- I wasn't any virgin when I came here, I'll admit that, but I decided when I wanted to get into this business that it would be everything to me, that until lightning struck I wouldn't have any sex life, and I didn't. Not until I was on the way home. It happens when you're an empath. There's no mistaking lust for love. The way you're feeling right now is like I betrayed you or something. We're not lovers, Tris! We never were! Just like you, I was in love with the job, the life, the thrills and challenges, not with anybody personal. Oh, I do love you, in the same way I love Tran and even the Durquist and poor Hama, too, but it's not the same kind of love."
Nothing inside him died down or quieted, although he remained on the surface a model of control as always. "So now what? You quit or sell out and go hobnob with the business types and be a good little wife and make tons of babies?''
"No, no! Not exactly, anyway. Yolan -- my husband -- is a partner in a company with a seat on several exchanges. He's about to switch from commodities over to the full Exchange, the big one. He won't be making the real decisions, of course -- I don't think any human has that much status yet -- but he can influence the implementation of the investments. In effect, we've become, through my marriage and the agreements we signed, a subsidiary of his company. Automatic business -- as much as we want, with a good bankroll to boot. We keep going, just like before. The only difference he insisted on, and the way the last one went he didn't have to insist very much, was that I not be a member of the ground team. Tran's wanted to get off backup for years, ever since I knocked him out of his slot by coming aboard. I know the ship and I've had the experience on the ground now to do backup. That way I'll be the intermediary between the company and the team. To you and the others, it won't seem any different, except that Tran will be going down instead of me. It's perfect, don't you see?"
His hurt was rapidly being superseded by rage, and he finally couldn't keep it in any longer. "Business as usual, huh? Nothing changes, except that we become some damned salaried employees and lose our independence and I have to work with you close as ever knowing -- " He paused. "Why did you come back? Why not at least have enough feeling for me to sell out and vanish? I could handle that, sooner or later, but this -- !"
"Damn it, I was always out of reach before!"
"Of everybody! And not out-front unattainable! Damn it, this changes everything! And, sooner or later, Mister Broker's gonna want kids 'cause it's the final fulfillment and you'll be sittin' there bloated and pregnant with another guy's kid and -- fuck it! Fuck you!"
She felt so awful at his reaction that she groped for what to say. "I -- I had no idea this would be your reaction! I -- I don't know what to do now.''
"Undo it! Get a divorce or annulment or whatever it takes. Cancel the deal. Go back to square one again!"
"That's not fair! I've finally found somebody who loves me for me and I finally have a few things right! I'm not going to throw it all away!"
"Not fair? Not fair? You bet your iron heart it's not fair!" He suddenly got up and swept all the papers, phone, intercom, and most of the contents of the desk onto the floor, then stalked out and slammed the door so hard that had the window been glass, it would have shattered.
She hadn't cried in years, but she had to cry now, and she still wasn't absolutely sure why she felt so guilty, but she stared at that door for a very long time.
She was still there when the Durquist came in.
To everyone, a Durquist was called simply a Durquist. Although they were as individual as most other races, they all seemed to have the same personality to others, and they all looked and sounded pretty much alike except to other Durquists. The Durquist culture somehow got along without names; they tried to explain it to others, but such comments as "Why do we need names when we know who we are and we aren't anyone else?'' quickly spun non-Durquist heads and the subject got changed.
Strictly speaking, a Durquist was shaped like a five-pointed star around a central orifice that looked very much like a huge set of jet-black human lips, behind which, mostly invisible to the onlooker, were row after row of sharp* pointed teeth. Brain,
stomach, and all the internal organs were somehow clustered inside that hard center. From it emerged the arms -- fluid, sucker-clad, able to stretch and twist and bend in almost infinite ways, yet with incredibly powerful muscles. The Durquist's eyes were a stalked pair, one on each side of the mouth; it allowed the creature to assume almost any posture from walking upright on any two arms of its choice and looking weirdly humanoid from a distance or on any combination of four.
The Durquist came in bipedally, the only practical way to get in the door, and the two eyes fixed on Modra.
"They said that you came in, and shortly after, Tris left as if he were on his way to blow up the Exchange and anything and anyone else who got in his way," the creature said. "You want to tell me about it?"
She nodded, and proceeded to recount the whole tale, sparing nothing. The Durquist settled back and listened intently, interrupting only a couple of times to clarify a vague point.
When she finished, the creature was silent for a moment, then said, "I do not fully understand your people, you know, for all that we live so closely together, but there are constants among the bulk of races, particularly when more than one sex is involved, and I am curious and observant by nature. It may be that I am totally wrong in the way I interpret these things, but I find it personally astonishing that you would think that he would react any differently than he did."
"I thought he'd be surprised, maybe have a little bruised ego, but nothing like what I got," she responded.
"I would have thought an empath in particular would never be taken that way. I know that an empath supposedly can tell lust from love, but it is possible that being too familiar for too long would blur the interpretation. What you could instantly divine in others you could not in him, because it was slow, steady, day-to-day, and, in essence, you tuned it out."
"He -- has great control, too, until today," she told him. "An ability to damp down what rises, to lessen what was there. They say that telepaths can read the surface thoughts but often miss what is way down deep. I think maybe it's that way with me."
"You felt his growing respect and concurrently growing affection, and it was what you wanted to feel from him, so you dug no deeper. The cause of most misery in any history isn't the lack of data, but the misinterpreting and distortion of the data. You have brothers, I believe?"
She nodded. "Yes, two."
"You mistook him for another brother, then. It is -- comprehensible, at any rate. The respect you earned caused him to love you, but you, an empath, could not tell one from the other. Being neither empathic nor telepathic himself, he was free to fantasize. Were he an empath, he would have done the opposite of you and mistaken the respect and affection for love. There is a great tragic saga in all this. In fact, I think I saw it on one of the entertainment channels the other day."
"Don't go your usual cynical ways on me right now," she implored him, sincerely trying to figure it out. "I need advice."
"Why? He loves you. You do not love him. It seems a perfect tragic impasse."
"But I do love him -- just not in the same way."
"No. You do not love him. You love what he represents -- what we all represent. More of that bad entertainment. You came here with all you had because you were in love with an idea. You found us in a time of need and you fell in love with the team and the lifestyle. What you love in Tris is his near perfect personality for the kind of cast you sought. Adventurous, brave, daring, highly competent, but a rogue. Not quite the sterling, perfect hero of fiction, but with enough of those qualities that you could ignore or tune out the flaws. You laid upon him your romantic vision, and even your empathic ability could not be allowed to soil the image. Yet you are intelligent enough to know that fiction ends before the romance goes bad; that there is no happily ever after with that kind of person. If there was, he would cease to be the person he was and become, in a word, dull. You want Tris to be what your romances imagine him to be. To have settled on him would have been to destroy the very qualities in him that you loved. That is not difficult to understand. Naive; juvenile, perhaps, but understandable even to someone like me."
"You're making me sound like some kind of idiot."
"The ignorance of the immature is common, regardless of age or experience. Tris in his own way is living out a romantic fantasy and is as guilty, if not more so, than you. But it is you who made the choice, not him, because he is a permanent adolescent. You needed more. You finally looked death in the face and you didn't like it. You found that you needed solidity, permanence, some kind of security, some guarantee of a contented future no matter how this went, and you needed it just as much, but no more, than you needed the team life and somebody like Tris. In your naivete, and emotional upset at the admittedly horrible experience you survived, you saw a way to have both. The solidity and fallback that your broker offered, and the adventure and challenge of the team. Even now, you have been sitting here because you do not want to accept the reality that you cannot have both. You must choose -- Tris and the rest of us, or the solid and loving if comparatively dull life of a broker's mate, possibly getting a job in his firm."
She felt suddenly angry, as if an orderly and perfect world had just been burned to ashes before her eyes. "And why should I have to choose? I'm the true owner of this company. I hold the majority. If he's not happy with it, he can leave. So can you and Tran. I'll find others, if I have to."
"It is not that simple. I'm getting on in years, and there are younger ones in the Guild Halls right now looking for any position I might fill. I have greater experience than they, but that only makes me more expensive to a prospective hire. The same with Tran. We might eventually find other work, but when you go through this so many times you become insecure. Nobody in this buyer's market is secure unless they are already working, and nobody voluntarily gives up a berth for that same reason. For Tris it is even worse. This is all he has. He's spent his whole life crawling up from the most abysmal beginnings on a world of perpetual poverty and woefully short lives to where he is captain of a team. Not much of a team, and not much of a ship or bank account, but compared to where he started, it is higher than he ever dreamed of getting. To ask him to walk out, to give it all up, when whatever we are he built, is to ask him to commit suicide. He can't leave. Even less than the rest of us, he has nowhere else to go. There are only two things that matter to him in this whole universe, and they are this company and you. You have removed yourself from even his fantasies and he could not stand to work with you as usual, when every contact with you will reinforce the hurt. In one moment you removed everything he had, even his dreams."
She sighed. "Shit! I feel like a rotten bastard, but I don't see a way out. Back home, when we went to get married, they of course sent us to some psychs -- hypnos, as usual. The psychs approved the marriage, said it was thebest thing for both of us, but with conditions. They said I needed this team life, too, but to continue with it, being away from each other for many weeks at a time, me with Tris, and him back here maybe wondering if he did the right tiling, the only way they'd sign off is if we both submitted to a hypno bonding. No matter what feelings I have on other levels for Tris, I feel no physical attraction to him at all -- or any other man but one, and that one only wants, desires, or can get it up for one woman -- me. No doubts, no questions, no insecurities, you see?"
"You can do the same thing to your mind with drugs and chemicals and not have to bother with all the paperwork," the Durquist grumbled. "Still, we have what is classically known as a 'situation' here. I just hope Tris isn't off to do something rash and stupid. Is your husband here in the city and well protected?"
Her head snapped up and she stared at the star creature. "You mean -- ! Oh, my God! He might, too! But, no, wait a minute. The marriage isn't registered here yet, so he can't look it up, and I never gave him Yolan's last name or even a company name, let alone an address. But I think I should call Yolan, anyway."
"Indeed. Tris, as you well know, can be quite -- resourceful."
She suddenly snapped into action. "Get hold of Tran -- I don't care where he is or what he's doing. I'll call Yolan and fill him in. Might be an idea to call the Prefecture and have them on the lookout as well. If Tris has really gone round the bend, they can help, and if not, he's bound to wind up in one of their holding cells sleeping it off."
But when a man like Tris was hurting like he was and yet was as resourceful as he was, in a city like the capital, if he wanted to stay invisible he very well could do so. A day passed, then two, then three. Even Trannon Kose's underworld contacts couldn't turn up much -- or wouldn't. Humans were such a tiny and insignificant group here on the capital world that those who were not a part of the system tended to be very clannish; it would take a human who knew the underworld to find a man who didn't want to be found.
At the end of the fourth day following Tris's disappearance, she began to think, even hope, that the Durquist had been wrong. After five years she hated to part with Tris in this way and with this much hurt, but if he couldn't bear working with her under the new conditions, well, then good luck and-Godspeed to him.
But in the middle of the night, in the high-rise comfort of the big apartment she now shared with her husband, the phone awakened her and the robotic switchboard put it through because it was from one of the few who had the right to preempt.
It was Trannon Kose.
"I think you better get down here," the pilot told her. "District Four, Hospital Nine, Intraspecies Intensive Care."
She was suddenly awake. "Why? What's the matter?"
"I found Tris. Or, rather, the coppers found him. I -- I think you better get down here as soon as you can. I've called the Durquist and he's on the way."
"Why? What's the matter?"
"I just think you ought to come down here, Modra. Now. There are decisions to be made." And, with that, he cut the connection.
Yolan offered to take her, but she told him to get back to sleep. He had a long day ahead and this was her business right now, not his.