"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 1 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)
He sighed. "No, not that girl."
The tiny creature made it to his shoulder, then slowly oozed its way toward his neck. He lay down on the bed, knowing that it couldn't be crushed or hurt in this way. He could have sat and pressed against a steel plate and it wouldn't have hurt Grysta, or dislodged her.
He thought of the creature as "her" even though, strictly speaking, the race was unisexual. Jimmy understood creatures who were bisexual, or trisexual, or whatever, but only secondhand, as he might understand another race by reading about it. That was part of the problem; Grysta seemed to understand him quite well, while he couldn't really understand the tiny creature at all. The biology, yes, but not the culture, not the attitude, not her relationship with him.
He turned on his side and Grysta stretched out, tiny "head" against the nape of his neck, body stretched out rigidly along his spinal column. Microscopic tendrils shot out from her underside, penetrating his skin in a thousand places. They were long enough to reach right into his nervous system, yet so tiny they could not be seen without aid. There was no pain; there was no real sensation at all, until Grysta had control.
Then his mind seemed to fog, his depression vanishing for now, rationality giving way to waves of pure pleasure washing over and through him. Orgasmic waves traveled to every nerve and cell in his body, an ultimate high that few could ever know or understand. And while it went on, while he writhed in ecstasy, Grysta fed, gorging herself on his blood, yet taking none that would be missed in the morning, and she, too, was undulating in pleasure, and whispering to him,
< You are depressed, > Grysta noted.
"Yeah, you pleased me," he mumbled, bringing himself erect and managing to get his feet over the side of the bed. "You always please me, Grysta. Like a habitual pleasure drug or a stimulator on the brain's pleasure centers pleases. Nobody can please like you, Grysta." That last was said in a tone of resignation and with a tinge of sarcasm as well. The attitude would be lost on Grysta, he knew.
< You constantly complain that I have deprived you of your inalienable right to be miserable. This I cannot comprehend, even after all this time. If you really wish to be miserable, I can make you so. >
"No!" You're doing a good enough job of that just being here, he thought sourly to himself. At least he had that one bit of privacy -- although the communication was mental in a way, Grysta was not a telepath, and required "interfacing" physically with her host for that. It could be the softest of whispers, but Grysta did require that he really talk to her. It always struck him as ironic that he could have mind-to-mind contact with a hundred different kinds of beings but he had to talk to the one he couldn't get away from. Grysta thought on different wavelengths than most of the universe.
Grysta was always a "her" to him; he even heard the voice in his mind as that of a woman, although she really was asexual. A strong, assertive woman's voice, less like a lover's than that of a boss, or maybe a mother.
< What is it you want, then?> Grysta asked him. She always asked him, but she never could understand the answers. How do you explain to a creature, however intelligent, who required a host to see, hear . . . feed . . . that the host resented her presence? No, that wasn't right -- he didn't resent her presence, he resented her control. Not that she would hurt him, but neither would she allow him to come to harm, for that would be like setting fire to a room in your house.
"I want a drink," he told her. "I want to get rip-roaring, stinkin'-arse drunk. I want to pop some aphros and go out on my own alone for a night on* the town, that's what. I want to pick a fight, go bloody roughhouse, get tossed in the tank with all the other arse-kickin' fools blowin' off steam. I wanna check into an Erotics parlor and indulge all my silly dreams for a bit, that's what. And I wanna do it alone."
< You know I can't permit that, Jimmy. Such things are destructive of mind and body, risking at best ill health and at worst injury or death. >
"But that's what I bloody need, you furry little slug! Risk. The risk that comes with independence. The risk that's the right of all citizens of the Exchange!"
< We've taken risks on many a hostile world, and come close to disaster, > she noted.
"We take the risks! Aye, we do, don't we. Because we have to work, because we have to be able to afford the basics of life, and because there ain't no other kind of job that would tolerate the two of us, and if we couldn't do that, then your dispensation from the coppers wouldn't hold water and we'd both be discreetly disposed of and you know it. And even now we might be faced with such a thing, being without a ship or crew or commission because your hesitation cost a Thetian life. Who's gonna hire us now, you bloody worm? We're Jonahs -- bad luck. And there's no shortage of folks in the Guild Halls to fill the available slots. At least most of them can get some kind of menial job dirtside to tide them through from berth to berth, or they can get off this metallic dirtball and find some colonial job. We wouldn't even pass the physical for that. You remember the one time we tried that. I hadn't known until then that burning at the stake wasn't a mere historical curiosity."
"We better," he responded, sounding like he hadn't much hope of it. "We're down to our last few hundred, and when that's gone we'll have only ninety days of Guild maintenance."
He got up, pulled on a shirt to conceal Grysta, then opened the door and trooped down the hall to the communal bathroom. Even as he did so, Grysta was manipulating his internal chemistry, providing stimulation, suppressing the usual aches and pains, generally cheering him up a bit so that while his depression wouldn't go away, it would be at least tolerable and he could look himself in the mirror.
He was getting old, he thought, and not even Grysta could stop that, only make it easier to live with. The face that stared back at him in the bathroom mirror was lined and weathered, the curly hair about half-gray, the thick, close-cropped beard streaked with white. He was beginning to look more and more like his late father, and Da always did look like he'd survived a bomb blast but the repairs hadn't totally took.
Here lies Jimmy McCray. His life was a waste of his own time and others', his purpose was to serve as the eyes and ears of a parasite. Here lies Jimmy McCray and Grysta together; even in death he couldn't get rid of her.
It was past midday when he left the Guild hostel and headed to the Hall in his daily exercise in futility, but if he didn't stick his name in religiously, they'd toss him out as a shirker. At least they fed you there.
The City was over a hundred and forty by ninety-five kilometers; a massive complex that spread out as far as the eye could see, and contained within its boundaries well over forty million souls, souls whose only common link was that they were all from someplace else. The whole thing was metal and plastic and other synthetics, and that even went for some of the people and most of their occupations.
The fact was, the whole place could have been run by computer and maintained by robots, but such things as robots on the level of personal or city or company maintenance were banned. The cabs that floated by as he walked toward the train station were various colors for the various racial groups, so that a Drukin wouldn't attempt to fit in a seat or space engineered for a Klive, or vice versa, and so that you could be assured that the internal environment was to your liking.
Such cabs would have human drivers, just as the crimson and gold Kluvian cab over there had one of the ash-white pyramidal Kluvians driving the thing. Hell, if you let robots do the driving and pick up the garbage and clean the streets and vacuum the hotel rooms, why, the vast assemblage here would be out of jobs and without v means or purpose. Though the Empire was truly one that prized individual freedom and the work ethic -- including the freedom to starve to death if you didn't have money for food or bleed to death if you couldn't afford treatment -- its leaders were fully conscious of the fact that millions or even billions of people of all races who were starving and bleeding in such huge numbers would quickly form a desperate, revolutionary mob.
The train floated in and stopped, and he entered the small blue and white compartment, alone as usual -- except for Grysta, of course. There were some other spacers staying in the hostel, who were human, but they were younger and more ambitious than he and they'd been at the Guild Hall when the doors opened at the crack of seven. Berths could open up at any time of the twelve-hour day the Hall was open, but the young eager beavers always were paranoid that the perfect position was going to be there at seven on the dot and filled by seven fifteen.
After several stops through a multilayered mass of buildings and overlapping roadways, walkways, tramways -- you name it -- that always reminded him of being trapped in the basement of a giant's office building, the train broke into the open and there was the Exchange in full view, surrounded by a very pretty if odd-looking park. To him, real parks should be varying shades of green and have trees that didn't look like melted candies or great tentacled monsters of red and blue and yellow, but it was still very pretty and nicely landscaped. In the center of the park, visible from any top floor in the city, rose the smooth, sleek crystalline Exchange Building itself, resembling nothing so much as dozens of monstrous clear quartz crystals bunched together and neatly tapered at the top so they reminded him of organ pipes. Any job that might reach the Guild postings would start there, and the Exchange had far shorter hours.
The train suddenly went into a tunnel underneath the park and the Exchange, and rode for a while in eerie darkness, although, of course, there were lights in his cubicle. Suddenly the vast station burst into view all around him and the train slowed, then stopped. The place; always packed during Exchange hours, looked like somebody's Alice in Wonderland nightmare no matter what race you were.
Here, bustling, hurrying, scurrying, slithering, and all sorts of other movements were constantly in view and it seemed like no two creatures, or at least no more than two or three, were alike. They were all people, all Citizens, but they had exoskeletons and no skeletons, claws and tentacles, two arms, four arms, two to what might have been forty legs, with teeth, mandibles, suckers, you name it. They were every color and shade anyone could imagine and a few that nobody had imagined until they saw them. They came in every shape and size, and perhaps one in five required some kind of aid, from a wheelchair to a breathing apparatus to a full-fledged pressure suit, to get around.
He was watching the parade, getting something of a kick out of it, when he caught sight of a fellow human -- a tall, strong-looking but very attractive redhead in a powder-blue jump suit and spacer's boots -- having an animated conversation with a Jurian and a Sloge. Jurians looked to most humans like three-meter land prawns; Sloges looked like giant snails in ringed, curled shells with toothy mouths. They always seemed ready to eat anything that couldn't eat them first.
He wondered what she was doing there, and considered a telepathic scan on the theory that at least one of them would be readable, but before he could more than note the conversation, the train glided off and was soon back in the darkness. It had been a long time since he'd seen a normal human woman, particularly one that looked as good as that, and, with the red hair, possibly Irish.
Probably just as well he didn't try the scan in there, though. The accumulated mass of thought in that tight space would most likely have overwhelmed him and given him a real bang-up headache.
The next stop was the one for the Guild Hall, and he got off and made his way up the moving stairs to something like street level in the crowded and confusing mass of the city.
The Hall itself was a big building with the Guild emblem atop the big double doors that opened for him as he approached them. Inside was the main hall, with its noisy, milling throngs of out-of-work spacers scanning the big computer boards for what openings mere were. Some were also color coded if there was some specific race desired, although most were just the usual white printing on blue background for generalized positions. Few companies were race specific unless they had a particular job that required a particular type, or, of course, the ship was one of the few run by life forms that either breathed the wrong stuff or had one of those nasty living environments.
He pulled out his Guild card and went to a terminal, inserted it, then watched the small screen in the unlikely event that he was just what somebody was looking for. Nothing of that kind showed, and he quickly scanned the ships and positions currently listed to see if anything looked really promising. Most of it was the usual stuff, but there was enough that he punched for a printout. The terminal hummed and then disgorged a small folded document and he took it with him to the cafeteria.
The one trouble with eating in the place was that the guy next to you might smell like rotting meat and be noisily ingesting a huge bowl of creepy-crawlies, and with the preparation of dishes based on the racial breakdowns gleaned from the Guild cards, there weren't too many choices for his kind of folks. Soup and a sandwich was fine; he lusted after a beer or at least a cup of coffee, but Grysta disliked stimulants and depressants and made sure that if he took one it made him unpleasantly sick. Sitting down with his tray as far away from other diners as he could, he started eating, then unfolded the printout and studied it in more detail.
There wasn't a whole lot. Black gang stuff, mostly, although that term had lost most of its original meaning. Ship's engineering assistants, general electronics repair and maintenance, shuttlecraft technicians, that sort of thing.
There were only three areas where telepaths really were desired. One was as security officers, since a good one always could tell something was wrong. The second was on First Teams, the first ones in to a newly discovered world, whose job it was to show up and see what tried to kill them. The third was on ships crewed by races that couldn't physically speak to each other without lots of elaborate hardware; the telepath knew no language barrier, although often the thoughts were bizarre and the frames of reference of alien races were nearly impossible to grasp.
But the bulk of spacer jobs was on the big ships, freighters and liners, where Talents were pretty well limited to security, medical, and the officer corps. The jobs most common in the Guild listings -- repairmen, monitors, quality control, and the like -- weren't for such as he. Talents were not all that common, and weren't well liked or appreciated by many people. Ones like him, from families without known Talents, and clever enough to realize what they had as soon as the Talent grew and concealed it, hadn't had to work all that hard, either, until they were found out. You didn't have to know anything; you just had to read the mind of the smartest kid in the class to get a good grade. He'd been about twelve when the strange dreams and voices he'd heard intermittently over the growing-up years had suddenly coalesced into full strength.
It was rough; you either got control, forced everything else out, learned how to tune in or turn off, and quickly, or the mass of thought would drive you crazy. Many of the unrecognized ones were nuts, particularly those who'd been born and raised in cities. He'd been a farm boy on a sparsely populated world, and it had given him the edge he needed.
It was said, however, that sooner or later everybody got caught, although he was never really sure how they knew that. If you didn't get caught, they wouldn't know they hadn't caught you, right? It was kind of like the perfect murder. They all said that there was no such thing, but, if it was perfect, who would know?
But they were good at catching Talents. The Empire's most elite, highly trained special branch was devoted to doing nothing else. They'd finally caught on to him -- they never told him how -- and then they gave him the treatment. The little finger on his left hand was indelibly dyed with concentric white and black rings that would never come off and could not be concealed for long -- the damned chemicals burned like hell if cut off from air and light for any length of time. And, of course, the most powerful computer-augmented hypnos in the Empire implanted a bit of ethics in your mind that you couldn't wash out, either, because you couldn't tell what was you and what was them. Even the Mycohl did something like that; nobody trusted Talents, least of all other Talents.
Like most telepaths, he kept it shut down most of the time, or, rather, down to a dull whisper that his consciousness could tune out. Non-telepaths never understood how terrifying it was to open up wide in any sort of crowd, to be suddenly flooded with all sorts of alien thoughts in a monstrous mess, like everybody speaking at once. That was why so many telepaths didn't live to adulthood, and why some who lived but never learned to shut out the world went violently insane.
He stared out at the vast Guild Hall and silently chuckled to himself. What would most of them think, he wondered, if they knew that if he bothered eavesdropping on their thoughts, he would probably be bored to death?
That afternoon he did put in for a couple of Exploiter Team positions that advertised for telepaths, and actually interviewed for one, but as soon as Grysta came up -- and in the close confines of a Team you couldn't exactly not mention Grysta -- the "Thank you very much, we'll be in touch" flag was raised and that was that.
After dinner there was the usual nothing to do, and so he wandered back over to the District, as he sometimes felt compelled to do.
Grysta commented, puzzled.
"You depress me, you little worm," he muttered. And yet, Grysta was right. He couldn't go on a tear like he wanted to do -- Grysta would see to that -- and there really wasn't much here otherwise. There was in fact only one club on the whole street that catered primarily to humans, and he'd found nothing there the past evening. Still, what the District offered him was quite tangible, quite real. It was live. The street was alive, teeming with all sorts of creatures with nothing but fun on their minds, in a city that seemed otherwise as curiously inanimate and deathly silent as its masters, the Guardians, that curious, ancient race that really ran the Empire.
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