"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 1 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)
But, as Tris had said, once it gets in your blood you can't just walk away. It wasn't that easy, particularly when she did love him, too, in a far different way than she loved Yolan. And, suddenly, she could see the Durquist's angry point, and the quiet Iran's as well.
She could have walked away at the start, and none of this would have happened. But to walk away now would add callousness to her insensitivity. It would leave all these terrible events with no meaning at all.
But did this decision involve Tris at all, really? Tris was dead. Gone. It was done, and she couldn't undo that, as much as she wanted to, craved to, undo it. She. would replay this over and over for the rest of her life, living with regrets and might-have-beens.
More important right now were Tran and the Durquist. It was more than just self-interest on their part; she understood the unspoken code they were insisting upon. Kama's death had been nobody's fault; although they'd been lucky up to then, that kind of risk came with the job. But the team was a team or it was nothing. To them, Tris's tragedy was the direct result of her actions, and that meant it was due to one member of the team letting down another. This decision boiled down to more than just her feelings and Tris's continued existence in some way. What they were really saying was that her own feelings and interests were against the feelings and interests of the team. If she refused what they wanted, she would be in effect dissolving the team. If she said no, there wasn't a being on a hundred worlds who would trust her to make coffee, let alone make decisions that might mean their lives. If she said no, she would not be a team player; her name would be passed around and her story told so that no spacer would ever even speak to her again. To make a mistake, even one like this, was understandable; to violate the team code was the unforgivable sin.
She hadn't worked five years for that.
She had made a mistake and it had cost. Now they wanted to know how much it had cost, and whether it really was just a mistake.
Most spacers never struck it rich; most spacers lived the same kind of hand-to-mouth existence they had, kludging and coaxing their rickety ships and equipment to keep going, doing whatever they had to do, always according to their own code and their own ways. She had not deliberately caused this thing; they would accept that. But if she said no, against the team now, she would lose the only things a spacer really had: pride, honor, and a sense of belonging, things that were earned the hard way, and the last things tossed out. No matter what, her thoughts and memories would force her to live with what she'd done. But to quit now, walk out on the team, would be to walk out on the only important thing she'd ever done or earned on her own.
But damn Iris for not sticking that gun barrel in his mouth and making so much of a mess of it that this wouldn't have been an option1.
"I cannot go against me interests of the team," she told them softly, in a voice without much expression at all. "You have my vote to proceed, Doctor. How long before we would get him back?"
"A matter of a few weeks. It's not as easy as all that. Only when we begin the process will we have an idea of the length and problems."
"Do what you must, and the best you can for him. Iran, Durquist -- we'll need another telepath. That's not going to be easy. Most telepaths are so unnerved by just being in the same room as a cymol that they'll starve first."
The two others visibly relaxed when she had given the go-ahead. Suddenly it was business as usual.
"Not to mention the practical problem that we lost a team member last time out and then had this happen on top of it," the Durquist noted. "For a while we will have -- what is it you humans call it? -- a Jonah reputation. Yes, that's it. This will not be easy. We may have to take what we can get."
"Do what you have to -- only, if possible, we want somebody with experience. Somebody who's used to working with an established team. We have a few weeks, and I can cover the bills until then. There's no rush."
"I know. But the only ones that have that kind of experience and would work for us under these conditions are probably Jonahs themselves. It will be difficult." The Durquist paused, its big black lips almost clenched for a moment. Then it said, "Modra -- go home and take a pill and get some sleep."
She nodded wearily. "I plan to do just that," she said, and got up to leave. The doctor had already left, since there was no point in remaining at this stage. Drained, Modra Stryke headed for the door.
"Modra," the Durquist called softly.
She stopped, turned, and faced the star creature. "Yes?"
"Welcome back, Modra."
She didn't smile back. Instead, she said, quietly, "We all make our own beds, I guess, and wind up doing what we have to do."
CHOOSING CORPSES
Jimmy McCray was also wondering how the hell he'd gotten into this kind of situation, but his problem stemmed from an act of kindness and compassion. He'd never really believed that there were such things as Jonahs, simply passing off "bad luck" spacers as incompetents, but that was before he had become one himself.
"Nag, nag, nag. Don't take it out on me," he grumbled to the Morgh, who was something of another useless dependent herself. "What was I to do? Walk away and let some innocent be slaughtered?"
< / have to take it out on you. There's no one else 1 can take it out on. >
Well, that was a fact, at least. Still, "At least you have somebody to take it out on. I have nobody, but I've all the responsibility, both for a hairy worm on my back and for a half-girl, half-goat, neither of whom can do anything useful or productive."
< Who are you calling a worm ? >
"If you don't like the situation," he told her, "you can always find yourself another host."
"Then shut up and let me think."
The Syn girl had come along meekly with him when they'd left the alley, almost like a small child, and it didn't take him long to realize that for all the sleaze of her past life, a child was pretty much what she was. Worldly only in her own element, she was apparently ignorant of all else. She seemed slow, even a bit stupid, but it wasn't clear yet whether that was part of her programming or simply the result of the course she'd been forced to take.
Her mind was an open book to him, but it gave him no answers. She didn't seem to really think, at least not in the way he defined that activity. There was no brooding, no real curiosity, no thinking about the future. He got the impression that she didn't so much act as react, and what little she did think she said aloud. It was as if she had no ego at all; that she existed only in reaction to others. Looking out the train window she had no real thoughts of her own as such; only occasional concepts like "pretty" or "dark" or other impressions, instantly made, instantly forgotten. In a way, she was more alien and unsettling to him than most of the bizarre life forms that made up the Exchange.
She didn't even really have a name, just one of those long numbers she'd memorized that meant nothing to anyone except maybe to her makers and the road company that had owned her. Some of those who got to be star dancers and the like got names, or nicknames, but she was strictly minor league. If the customer wanted a name, she asked him for his favorite one and took it for the evening. Jimmy changed that on the way home the first night.
"Anybody from now on asks you your name, you tell them
, it's- Molly. If they want a full one tell them you're Molly McCray." He'd always liked the name. He'd had the hots for a
Molly once, back when he was in school, and it was also the
name of one of his grandmothers.
"Okay, master," she'd responded docilely. "For you I be Molly McCray."
"No, for everyone. From now on. Understand? And never, ever, call me 'master' again. You will call me Jimmy. Everyone calls me Jimmy."
She nodded, although he wasn't sure how much sank into that pretty head. "Okay, Jimmy. I do whatever you say."
It was almost with a shock that he'd realized she meant that literally. Slavery was illegal except on some of the very primitive worlds, and it was morally repugnant to him, but she wasn't a real person with real status or rights; she had the same position in the empire of the Exchange as a robot or computer, even though she was a living, breathing person.
"Do you know how to do anything except dance and lie with men?" he asked her.
She looked at him blankly, as if the question itself was absurd. Worse, the picture patterns that came into her mind in reaction to the question were all of things very much related to just that.
She reached up to scratch her cheek and for the first time he noticed her fingers. Four long-nailed fingers on each hand, but no thumbs. None.
"Do all the Syns lack thumbs?" he asked her, genuinely curious. In all these years he'd never really noticed.
"All the ones I know," she responded matter-of-factly. "I think it a rule or somethin'."
A deliberate design flaw, he thought sourly. To keep them from ever being anything but what they were, and to make sure they were only useful for what they were intended. It sure put limits on what you could do, anyway. Even opening containers, twisting knobs, that sort of thing, would be extremely difficult. Hell, you used thumbs in almost everything. There wasn't an intelligent species without opposable thumbs or pincers or prehensile tentacles or the equivalent.
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