"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 1 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)
There weren't many humans through here, but there were always some, and it wasn't hard to find them and hook the interested ones. More surprising was that business also came from the human resident community. Men who for reasons of marriage or reputation couldn't be seen in the District proved a better market than the spacers did.
He was astonished at how quickly the money came in, and how quickly it grew. It was quite easy to move out of the Guild hotel and into a small but comfortable place in a better part of town, one more convenient and safer for the residents. They weren't going to starve and they weren't going to sink into poverty. Oh, even at her speed they'd never be rich, but they'd never really want for anything, either.
Syns had no legal status and no rights, but neither did he have a true legal claim to her under the law, a nervous Grysta pointed out. When word got around, various unsavory elements might find it expedient to appropriate Molly for their own, or employees of valuable brokerages might move some power levers to get her exclusively. Again, it was Grysta who also came up with an answer.
"But you can't marry a Syn!" he protested. "They aren't even legally people! It's just not done!"
And, as usual, Grysta was right. The cymol clerk nearly blew a fuse when he saw the bride and checked the classifications, and, for the first time, Jimmy watched as a cymol removed part of its hair and plugged itself into a master console. There was no way of knowing if the thing was simply scanning at unnatural „ speeds every statute and legal decision in the Exchange's half million-year history or if it was passing the buck all the way to the Guardians, but after about twenty minutes the hair patch went back on, the connector went back in its socket, and the cymol returned to them. Looking a bit distressed, he said, "The unit is reported as deactivated and destroyed by its owners, so there are no claims. There also appears to be no precedent. The only question is one of consent, since, legally, you are asking to marry a machine. However, subject to legal challenge at a later date, there doesn't seem to be any reason why a citizen who is certified legally sane can't marry a seat cushion."
"What do you mean 'subject to legal challenge'?" Jimmy asked him.
The cymol shrugged. "If someone should lay claim to it in court, you would then be faced with a court case on the validity of the marriage, or, say, if someone with cause sued to dissolve the marriage, well, you would have to defend in court. There is, as I say, no precedent, although I must say there are precedents for things that make this look simple by comparison. But the burden would really be on a challenger, not you. Very well, let me get the records going here. I assume you don't want a ceremony."
< Yes, we do, > Grysta responded.
"No, just the legal part," McCray said.
That amounted to no more than stating the answers to a few basic questions by each of them in front of a recording device and it was done.
Molly had no idea what all this was about, and no real concept of the legalisms; her thoughts seemed to indicate that she saw this as a kind of legal bill of sale, officially making her his property, the way a farmer would transfer a cow or a horse to another owner, and dissolving any claims her old owner had.
Of course, Jimmy also considered it pretty much of a sham; the only fellow ever married who wouldn't be allowed to consummate the marriage, although half the males through here could do it for him.
Of course, if she ever really grew up, was capable of growing up, it would also be easy to get an annulment on that basis, which was comforting.
Getting her documents to make her real also provided a bit of amusement, since immediately after name and address you had to enter "racial code," and, quite naturally, there was no racial code for a Syn. There were a hundred and forty-six officially recognized sentient races of the Exchange, a hundred and twenty-nine known sentient races that didn't duplicate the others for the Mycohl, and a hundred and six non-duplicative sentient races for the Mizlaplan, but none of them really fit her. Of course, being an efficient bureaucracy, they did have a "None of the preceding" category, after which one had to go through a lot of stuff defining not only what the applicant was but why he/she/it wasn't any of the above. He simply put down the basic truth, which would have the best legal standing, and submitted the whole thing.
The electronic terminal seemed to blink, hesitate a bit, then there was a series of noises and out of the slot came a nice glossy holograph ID card with her new name, official picture, and the basics beyond encoded on it so that it could be read by other electronic devices as needed. The racial code, however, was 999-999, the classical "None of these," which, in a legal sense, put Molly in the same racial category and group as Grysta. That fact, and the thing actually going through and being accepted, made him thankful that Grysta had never gotten this marriage idea herself between species. He fervently hoped that an involuntary mating such as they had wouldn't be so easily recognized. With all the races and worlds and customs, polygamy and polyandry weren't all that uncommon in the Exchange.
Well, if Grysta got the idea, at least he felt he could convince her that it would be against his religion, which it would be, if he still had one.
And, perhaps he did, for he was still alive, and the vestigial remnants of his ancestral religion was probably the only explanation why he hadn't done away with himself.
The problem was, the only thing that kept life at all interesting for him was now forbidden him as well because of his situation. Space was his true love, his erotic passion, the one thing that mattered above all others. Space was not merely his romance, his dream, it was the crudest mistress of all. Had he not been infected with it, he'd not have one creature on his back and another out whoring for him. Space was a sadistic lover, and he was masochistic enough to want her back.
And that was why, when the Durquist had called for an appointment -- and he knew that Molly held no charms for a Durquist -- his heart skipped a beat and he could not contain himself in spite of knowing that anyone remotely interested in him would be repelled by his excess baggage.
The Durquist settled its starry shape against some pillows and looked at him with both stalked eyes. Jimmy tried to read it but got mostly mush. Although the Durquist wasn't a telepath, it had obviously been through a good training program for thought shielding, which was impressive. Unless the star-shaped being let its guard down, this would be strictly voice.
"Let us get some preliminaries out of the way to begin with," the creature began. "We are aware of the Morgh, and your past history. That, in and of itself, should tell you something."
Jimmy nodded. "You need a telepath pretty bad and you can't get one. Why? There must be a hundred experienced telepaths on the rolls, rotting here right now."
McCray frowned. "They refused you? In this job market?"
"In a moment. First I would like to know just what happened on your last expedition with the, Zumaqualash. We have read the official reports and debriefings, and heard a bit second hand from various spacers, but we'd like to know just why you were fired by your own side."
He shrugged. "Not much of a story, really. We were doing a First Team evaluation of a dirt ball out at Cue Veranzas, near the Mycohl frontier region but free space, and it was the usual thing."
The whole area looked like a sea of blue-white sand, and in it and all over it were rocks; horribly twisted, shaped by blowing sand and steady wind into every shape and size and needing little additional imagination to see in them sinister shapes and figures. Yet, as twisted and bizarre as they were, like massive blotches of gray and orange paint formed into globules when dropped in water, they had a certain -- regularity -- about them, almost as if they were, somehow, planned, shaped, sculpted even, but by a mind too alien to fathom.
Throughout the landscape were the dust devils -- hundreds, thousands of them, all whirling about and careening into things and stirring up sand and dust. Yet the instruments and probes had shown the dust devils to be nothing more than that, potentially dangerous but not terribly substantial, and the rocks and sand were composed of known compounds. Anything out there unmeasured and unseen would remain so to the robotic probes and instruments; anything that left tracks had remained out of sight, and any tracks it might have left would have been smoothed over by the bizarre dust devils' madcap dances.
"Nothing particularly weird," Jimmy McCray remembered. "There were certainly no life forms down there that answered to the known carbon- or silicon-based formulas that serve as our definition. Of course, I don't have to tell you that our definition of life needs a lot of work."
"Indeed," the Durquist agreed. "And certainly in your case."
McCray nodded. "It was funny. All our instrumentation, the robotic probes, you name it -- all ignored. The atmosphere was rotten enough that we couldn't drop live animals for any kind of meaningful test, so we dropped a few dead ones. The only thing that seemed to happen was that some of the dust devils moved in and over them and buried them in the sand. No big deal, and nothing really suspicious enough to ring any alarms."
"You dismissed the fact that the dust devils had moved in and over them as mere coincidence?"
"Sure. Wouldn't you? I mean, you could watch those little buggers going this way and that with no apparent purpose or consistency and not see any sense at all and, hell, there were so many of them, a few were bound to cross over. And they were so insubstantial, really, that the figures said there'd be no real problem breaking out of one if you walked into it or it rolled over you."
"So they were laying for you, as it were."
"I'm not sure. I'm still not sure of anything there. We hit the ground, fanned out, did the usual routine, and it was like ten or maybe fifteen minutes before the ship controller noticed anything really odd. I mean, hell, we're looking at potentially hostile or intelligent actions, right? We were so concerned with avoiding the damned dust devils that it never occurred to anybody, not even the ship's computer, that the dust devils were avoiding us."
"Indeed. The pet that made no noise. An old error, but a common one."
Jimmy shrugged. "Well, everything went just fine until Almuda -- a Thetian and our geological evaluator -- went over to one of those weird rock protrusions and decided to drill a core sample. As soon as he started, they just went wild.'''
"The rocks?"
"The dust devils. They had no natural enemies, or at least no natural enemies left, and no matter how chaotic they were, they never seemed to hurt each other, so it wasn't like we sprung a trap or anything like that, or that they had any hidden weapons or powers -- but they sure blew their corks. And, in just doing that, and converging on poor Almuda, they used the only kind of weapon I guess they had -- they began picking up massive amounts of sand and then hurling it, in effect sandblasting him. The suit was enough to protect him from that, of course, but it was a godawful amount of sand and thrown at great force and it quickly started to bury him."
"Did they turn on the rest of you?"
"No, just him, with more of 'em coming every minute."
"You tried to help him, I assume."
"Well, every time we made a move for him, a bunch turned on us and started spitting sand so hard it knocked us back. When we retreated, they stopped. We tried the pistols, we tried every kind of weapon we had that wouldn't have killed Almuda, and they had no effect. It was like shooting air. The computers got us to back off after that, and they tried a wide beam from the shuttle above the dust devils, trying to superheat the air and maybe dissipate them or something, but whatever they tried didn't work. The heat just made them stronger. It drove us absolutely nuts, hearing Almuda's cries, his pleas for help, and not being able to do anything."
"I see, and with a forty-hour air supply ..."
"Yeah, you get it. Most of the team couldn't stand it anymore. We pulled back and tried to comfort him, and we hoped that maybe if the dust devils finally buried him completely and couldn't see or hear him anymore that they'd give up, but they kept at it. Night came and they kept at it. Day broke and they kept at it."
"They roust have built quite a sand dune."
"It was a monster, covering even all remains of the rocks. They finally did stop, after maybe thirty hours, but they didn't move off or move away, and they kept keeping us away. It was as if they knew, somehow, that he had a limited amount of time. After a while we figured out how. Somehow they could intercept his radio, maybe sense thebroadcast energy or something. Everybody else had sort of given up, just on a deathwatch at that point, but I couldn't. I finally figured that if we could get an accurate fix by beacon, then he could kill his power and maybe that would end it and I could get to him. By that time he was near panic and willing to try anything. He cut his power, which gave me about twenty minutes before he'd have to turn it back on or suffocate, and, sure enough, the things lost interest and started to drift away. We all rushed in immediately with whatever we could bring in, and started digging. We quickly found we couldn't use the automatic stuff after a while -- the sand was so soft it kept filling in, burying and jamming the controllers, and potentially shifting him as well. So, after we got as much off with the equipment as we could, there wasn't any choice but for us to just go at it like demons with shovels."
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