"Chalker, Jack L - Quintara 1 - The Demons at Rainbow Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)
At least you knew that the Mycohl, masters of their own empire, were some kind of communal parasitic organism; they had a biology, a reality, of sorts. And the Mizlaplan, while not very mobile, at least had a known form and known evolutionary path and were very real to the citizens of their own empire. But here, in an empire that didn't even have a name, let alone an emperor, in the only free society of the Big Three empires, nobody at all knew who or even what the bosses were. Their great cities, like this one, were built by others for the comfort and convenience of others. The Guardians themselves had no cities, no monuments, not even an official history -- not one they let anybody else know about, anyway.
Some thought them a great computer or assemblage of master machines; some thought they were beings of pure energy, pure mind. Many deep down didn't believe they really existed at all, but were just some construct created by the board of the Exchange as a false front for their own rule. Unlike those citizens of the Mycohl Empire or those of the Mizlaplan, however, the Guardians -- whatever they were and if they existed or not -- were not thought about much at all by the people of their empire, which seemed to suit everybody just as well.
He looked in on the Club and saw that the stage revue, in the round, was in full swing. It was dirty enough, all right, if you were into bestiality. Big, goat-horned satyrs doing obscene and unnatural things with the sexy equine dryads, who were able to twist into amazing positions. It was rough and brutal, to the sounds of overly loud canned music, and it did little for him.
< / don't understand why they go in for the half-human, half-animal thing, > Grysta commented.
"They do," he told her. "This particular lot is booked in for a week or two, then they'll have mermaids or centaurs or any one of a thousand varieties of mixes, while this group moves on to one or another of the big cities on the other worlds. This one just happens to have that theme."
"That's a no-no," he told her, thinking he'd told her this several times before. When Grysta was trying to figure something out and having trouble she often asked the same questions every time the subject came up. "It's called prostitution and it's done, of course, but rarely. Too many really nasty quick-mutation sexually transmitted diseases. Space travel, strange suns, odd atmospheric balances, and varied radiations -- the same son of stuff that caused the birth of Talents -- also caused brand new birth defects and mutations, and a nice variety of human diseases, particularly viruses and other tiny buggers. In fact, these Erotics were actually created in an attempt to stamp out such things. It was a crusade for morality on many of the human worlds."
"Yes, you'd recognize slavery, no matter how subtle, wouldn't you?" he muttered, mostly to himself. "But they aren't what you think. They're constructs, androids -- genetically engineered, yes, but from synthetic materials, not human stock. One of the few legal uses of the advanced science of robotics allowable, created and programmed to do just what you see, and they neither want nor think about anything else. And because they're synthetic, human viruses and diseases can't survive inside them."
He turned away, walking back out into the street. Grysta was silent for a few moments, then commented,
He nodded, although it was meaningless to the creature. "Fortunately, it takes a bloody fortune plus lots of expertise and research to do that sort of thing, and various components that can be rigidly controlled. The Mycohl, for example, have been trying to find out how it's done for decades and failing. The Mizlaplan, of course, consider the whole thing an abomination."
"I think it's probably done what was intended with no harm to anyone. There are still perverts out there, and people either desperate or stupid or defenseless that fall prey to them, but it's way down, perhaps as far down as a society that doesn't engineer its people and dictate their minds can bring it. Every cure has its price."
As Grysta considered that, he relaxed and looked around the streets and alleyways and opened up his mind a bit.
< GOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLE. . . . !>
Oops! Too wide. Bring it down to a dull roar.
< Gobblegobble . . . went to the wall on that one . . . gobblegobble . . . chanted the Fifth Order Cycles . . . gobblegobble . . . first maze Sudura crimped . . . > What the hell did that mean? So many races, so many odd concepts and ways of thinking. It was strange that something like eighty per cent of carbon-based life used bands within a rather narrow range for primary-level thinking. Secondary and deeper thought levels were often way off the mark, beyond all but the most powerful and expert to even touch, with a great variation in the bands even among people of the same race.
But on the primary band, most species did their thinking within ranges that even telepaths of totally alien evolution and biology could intercept. Mostly, of course, he just heard what they were saying aloud to someone, or what was foremost on their minds. You couldn't go on a fishing expedition in somebody else's head -- that took machinery and psychophysicians -- and there was a lot of mostly banal stuff on the surface. Listening to races that were off his bandwidth and beyond his powers, he still got the sense of someone or something there, like a silent but active channel on a radio. And, every once in a while, held feel the odd twinge of a mind instinctively pushing back, of some kind of barrier -- not usually hostile, just automatic, like he himself did when another telepath scanned him.
What disturbed him, though, particularly here, was something he couldn't really explain to any non-telepath, not even Grysta. The street, the immediate neighborhood, was to a telepath like a living organism, a kind of mental life that could be felt as something tangible. But on this particular world, even in crowds, there were occasional and jarring dead spots.
Unless he picked them out and scanned them exclusively he couldn't spot them, but they were here. Black holes of the mind, dead to Talents, dead in other senses as well. Zombies, perhaps, or so he and most others thought, but the one link between the Guardians and this mass that were always there.
They were called Cymols. Real people, living people, who were no longer themselves, who had as part of their brains a small controlling computer. They were the losers, mostly, in this society -- habitual criminals, murderers, suicidal types, the incurably insane. Their minds, some said their souls, had been replaced, reprogrammed by the Guardians. They could plug in to each other, or to the computer grid, and perhaps to the Guardians themselves.
As far as he was concerned, they were all coppers, and scary types to boot. They looked, talked, and acted just like regular folks, and none but some of the Talents could tell them apart from the crowd.
There'd be a bunch of them down here, of course, checking on the crowds, checking, too, on the people and companies that ran the District, looking for serious criminals and clip artists, making sure that the most wanted didn't vanish into this deliberately created cesspool.
In truth, so long as you weren't arrest bait, this was one area in which the vast majority who had no Talents had the edge. They could conveniently forget that the cymols existed, just as they could ignore the Guardians, and interact with them in ignorance as if they were just ordinary blokes. Talents, though, particularly telepaths and empaths, had to know them for what they were, and it gave them all, including Jimmy McCray, the creeps.
reached, cursing himself for having opened up so wide in a place like that without thinking about the obvious presences he would touch there. Odd to think that there were presences that stuck out because of the absence of signal.
< This isn't the safest of courses to take, > Grysta noted nervously. They'd been on a lot of worlds that were sheer horrors, but always with a team -- backups, protection, and weaponry at their disposal. Jimmy ignored the danger of dark alleys and side streets here, but Grysta felt suddenly very exposed and insecure.
"Cymols," he muttered, shivering. "You know how they give me the creeps."
"Oh, relax. We're not exactly defenseless, and even if we got pounced on, what in heaven's name have we got worth stealing? Besides, I'm still open on the primary band. We'll not be surprised."
It was a telepath's confidence, something a non-telepath could understand but not really accept. Nor, of course, was it fully warranted. Some of the best crooks could fool a telepath, and, while Talents weren't all that common, one telepath who was slightly stronger or more skilled could easily fool a lesser. And, here, on this world, there were plenty of the one race no telepath could scan.
It was a man's "voice," very loud on the primary band and only slightly less so on the hearing level, so strong and powerful that the speaker had to be very close, but, save for its virulence, Jimmy didn't think of such things as any of his business. He was no voyeur. The sounds of a nasty electronic buzzing and the subsequent screams of real pain in a loud female voice changed that.
Telepathy had uses, but it wasn't very directional unless you fixed on the subject visually, and the layers of the great city, like some monstrous metallic wedding cake, created echoes and false signals. He looked around, tried to pick out the likely source, and saw a very dark, narrow service alleyway to his left. He headed for it, then broke into a trot as the victim's screams and the man's curses both grew stronger and louder. He could see a glint of light pierce the darkness for a moment with each electronic sound.
Jimmy wasn't sure just what he'd see when he got there, but he wasn't quite prepared for the sight ahead of him.
They were on a loading dock in back of the Club, the human Club, and there were two of them in near total darkness. The only illumination came from a tiny yellow safety light on the back door, and a blue-white electrical light that flashed intermittently from something in the man's hand.
He was a big man, that was for sure, although there wasn't much else you could tell about him in this light, and he had a foot on some dark shape on the dock, holding it down, and as he cursed and screamed threats, the blue-white light flickered once more and became a jagged whiplike pencil of energy, which he brought down on his captive. As the energy whip struck, she screamed again in pain and pleaded nearly unintelligibly for him to stop.
"Hold it, mister!" McCray cried out, his own voice echoing down the narrow street and up the many layers of the city. "You're in civilization here, and that sort of thing just won't do!"
The man at first didn't seem to hear, but then at least the fact that somebody else was there and yelling at him seemed to penetrate his thick, angry skull. He paused, but did not move to free his captive. Instead, he flicked a thumb switch on the electric whip, changing it into an electric torch that suddenly illuminated McCray and nearly blinded him.
"Hey! What . . . ?" The man muttered, a bit confused. "What the hell are you doing here, sport?"
"I heard screams," McCray responded calmly. "That's not done on this world, even in this place."
"You mind your own bloody business!" the big man snapped. "If I want to kill this fucking bitch -- or maybe not-fucking bitch would be a better term for her worthless hide -- I'll bloody well do it. She's bought and paid for and got no rights." The torch swung suddenly off McCray and onto the hapless victim, and McCray took a breath.
It was one of the pretty equine Erotics.
"You ain't no copper I got to explain nothin' to," the man added, "and I can do what I damn well please with my property."
Jimmy McCray looked at the girl with the hooves and tail, lying there, stark terror on her face, part of her hair singed and bloody welts on her skin. In a legal and technical sense Grysta was right, of course, but no one seeing that terror and that pain could have walked away and not also left his last shred of honor and dignity. His honor and dignity were pretty much all he had left.
"You're right, I'm no copper," he responded to the man in that same even tone, "and I'm no lawyer, either, but where I come from, whipping dogs or horses is still a crime even if you own them. Cruelty to animals, they call it, and that is far more than a dog or a horse. In fact, we tend to whip the owners of the mistreated animals so they know what it feels like/*
"You arrogant little Mick bastard!" the man spat. "A thousand years of gettin' your asses kicked in and you're all too dumb to ever learn a thing!"
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