"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 1 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)
About the only positive surprise was that she seemed to be able to metabolize just about anything organic -- a cost-saving measure, most likely -- and-her natural body odor, which he'd feared might be goatlike, seemed sweet and even slightly perfumed.
And, when she was told to figure out a way to do something, such as operate the shower or tidy up, she put herself single-mindedly to the task. She wasn't always successful, but she always tried to do exactly what she was told.
The biggest surprise to him, though, was that she was a broadcast empath.
She was just sitting in the room, staring at him, and suddenly he began to get very, very turned on. Had it not been for Grysta, he would have thought it simply the normal reaction to the situation, but the Morgh seemed to sense something and jolted him just a bit. Then he saw in Molly's mind a single concentration on him, and was able to break it.
"Are you doing that?" he asked her. "Trying to turn me on?"
"Isn't that what you want?" she responded a bit seductively. "Why else do Jimmy want me?"
"To save your life, remember?"
The comment should have triggered a series of thoughts in her, but it didn't; instead, it triggered only vague confusion and a quick thought-burst that took him a moment to make sense of. When he did, he was shocked to realize that she had no real understanding of his actions, because she placed no value on herself beyond her function in life and saw that function as her sole value. She saw no reward in having her life saved, because she placed no value on it; it was somebody else's to save or take. The Boss Master had been hurting her; she had cried out, mostly mentally, against it and McCray had shown up. McCray had fought theBoss Master and won her as the prize.
Until this moment, he hadn't realized just how alien she was.
First things first. He wanted no more surprises.
"Can you read feelings, or just cause them in people?" he asked her gently.
"Mostly just make men want me, make things real nice, so it always go just right."
He nodded. He knew of few broadcast empaths who could also receive clearly, just as there were only a few receivers who could do any kind of broadcasting on even a very low level, but you never knew when somebody was designed rather than born. It was likely she could broadcast almost any emotion, and over a fairly broad range and with some power, too, although she probably was unaware of it, being untrained and untested. It explained the effect the beating had on him, too. He'd heard the screams and protests both aurally and telepathically, but rein-
forcing it was the empathic broadcast. He had literally felt an echo of her fear and misery, and that had made it nearly impossible for him not to do what he did, although, even now, he liked to think that he would have done it anyway.
"Why couldn't you use this power to stop the Boss Master from hitting you?" he asked her, knowing the answer almost as. soon as he asked the question.
"Boss Master like hurting us," she responded matter-of-factly.
To a sadist, that kind of broadcast would be confirmation of punishment well-inflicted and maybe a real thrill, too. That, in fact, was just the kind of man they'd hire to manage and shepherd a bunch like the Erotics.
He sighed. "This is going to be very hard for you to understand, but you must understand it. First, you do not do that to me, ever. It won't work, anyway. Second, I did not save you to have my own slave or live-in lover. I saved you because I do not like seeing anyone hurt, and I do not believe in letting anyone be killed. You are here because, having done what I did, I am now responsible for you. That is not what you are used to, but it is what is true."
To his surprise, she did understand it, to an extent -- and it made her feel miserable. If she wasn't to be his lover and slave, then she had no value or purpose at all.
"Is that all you want to be? Have you never dreamed of being something else, doing something else, finding other things to do?" he asked her, growing exasperated.
She looked at him very seriously and said, truthfully, "No."
"All right, all right! Now, I am going to show you why you can't make me happy -- and, believe me, it isn't from a lack on your part." With that, he removed his shirt, then turned his back to her.
She stared at Grysta, flattened out like some black and white woolly caterpillar in the small of his back, and, for the first time, she showed real curiosity. "What -- what is it?"
"That, my dear, is Grysta. Grysta is from a planet where there are a lot of big but dumb creatures. Grysta's race is parasitic -- they can only live if they are in some way attached to somebody else."
"Depends on how you look at it," he mumbled.
Molly didn't know the word parasitic, but she got the idea from the rest of what he'd said. "You mean it sucks your blood or something? I be told of things like that."
"It's a little more complicated than that, but let's just say that Grysta can only eat through me and in fact can only see and live through me. Don't worry -- even if she could live off a Syn's body -- which is something we don't know and which I actually doubt -- considering how much of your system is devoted to keeping you disease-free, she wouldn't move. She's quite happy with me, and the coppers know about her and would kill her if she did move to somebody else."
"But you be not happy with her there," Molly responded, surprising him again.
He sighed. "Just like you were the property of the Boss Master, I, in a way, am owned by Grysta."
"It -- think? It tell you what to do?"
"Yes to both questions, although I don't necessarily do what she wants me to. She argued that I shouldn't save you, for example. Some things, though, I can't help. In her mind, and in her race's way, she is married to her host, and she is jealous. Some of the people you serviced were married, but they didn't bring their wives with them or probably even tell them about you. Grysta must go everywhere with me."
"And she not let you touch me."
This is crazy, he thought to himself. She's gone from feeling sorry for herself to feeling sorry far me!
"That's about it. Now you know that I spoke the truth about why I fought for you and why you' are here."
Now Molly exhibited at least one other human trait -- the common reaction when anybody learned of Grysta. "How it come to get on you?" she asked him. "And where are others of it?"
He chuckled. "Don't worry -- you won't go to that world, ever. Nor will, most likely, anybody else who might be a suitable host. I'm a spacer, or, at least, I was a spacer, when I had a ship and mates. We explored new worlds, and Grysta's was one of them. Her race had developed a fair intelligence and mostly lived off the big dumb creatures I talked about. I am a telepath. You know what that is?"
"You read minds. Can you read mine?"
"Sort of, but never mind that for now. I read some very complicated thoughts in the big dumb critters and we saw that they had built a kind of civilization. Not very modern, no machines, but grass houses and some roads and things like that. But the creatures just didn't have the brains to do it. I was one of those sent in to find out who did have the brains, and I found out. The story isn't very exciting, really. I sat in the village and tried to communicate and before I knew it, they'd slapped Grysta on me. At least we found out, I suppose, but by the time I was picked up, Grysta had so figured out my insides and got so comfortable, she'd have died if they took her off, and maybe killed me in the process. She'd have to tidy me up to move on, you see. It looked for a while like I was going to be stuck down there for life, but the rest of the team studied me and Grysta, and figured out that she couldn't lay eggs without another of her kind and she was very smart and so came under the Sentience Law -- if a race is found that's smart, that can think, it has certain rights. At the time, some people saw real advantages in this combination, although that idea was later given up. While they had it, though, they decided I could leave, with Grysta's promise not to move off me to anyone or anything else or she'd be killed. That was six years ago."
Molly kind of followed the story, showing more of an attention span than he'd given her credit for, and some logical sorting ability as well, but her conclusion was still very Molly.
"Then you not my master. My master is your master."
This time, Jimmy McCray gave her no argument.
The solution to his most immediate predicament didn't really leave him overjoyed, but there wasn't any other way that he could see, and it did, at least, seem to make everybody but him happy, as usual.
Educating Molly, making her into a more independent son at least -- she could never really be anything but dependent for the basics, due to her physical limitations -- proved exasperating. There were flashes of curiosity about things that directly concerned her or him, but not beyond that. Certainly she didn't see any value to learning anything that had no immediate and obvious benefit to her. Occasionally she'd show flashes of real intelligence, but they would be brief, transitory, and as soon as the problem was solved or the question answered, she went back to her normal near-vegetative mental state. It was certain that she had no concept of abstraction or any sort of ambition.
The problem was, neither he nor Grysta had any idea whether her mental limitations were simply because of her previous life or were programmed into her very core by the genetic engineers.
There was, in fact, only one thing she really wanted to do, and it was Grysta who finally suggested to Jimmy that a solution to their problems might be in letting her do it. He resisted for a while. His upbringing and spacer outlook recoiled from the idea, and to go through with it would mean shucking the last sliver of pride he had, but he finally realized that for the immediate future it was really the only thing to do.
He had someone who was quite literally created as a sex object and who wanted to be one, and he had access to the Spacers' Guild Hall and the contacts that went with it. That hadn't gotten him any job, and the fact that he now had Molly made shipping out even less likely in the future, but such contacts could get her into a sort of ancient employment.
It was quite typical of the way his life and luck had gone that an act of sheer kindness prompted by the highest moral values, had wound up turning him into a pimp.
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